


The Boy With A Moon And Stars

by Blucifer



Category: Stray Kids (Band)
Genre: Alien Altered Hypno Cum, Alien Cultural Differences, Alien Minho, Alien Sex, Alien anatomy, Alien/Human Relationships, Aquariums, Dolphin Trainer Chan, Double Penetration, Knotting, Long Distane Relationship, M/M, Minho's Cats are Demigods, Oral Knotting, Polyamory Negotiations, belly bulge, established chanlix
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-09
Updated: 2020-09-12
Packaged: 2021-03-02 00:40:43
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 28,248
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23566228
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Blucifer/pseuds/Blucifer
Summary: Although Minho and Chan came from different worlds, spoke different languages, and believed very different things, one common thread connected them. They were both in love with the boy with a moon and stars drawn upon his skin.
Relationships: Bang Chan/Lee Felix, Bang Chan/Lee Felix/Lee Minho | Lee Know, Bang Chan/Lee Minho | Lee Know, Lee Felix/Lee Minho | Lee Know
Comments: 44
Kudos: 200





	1. Chapter 1

“Min-ho,” Doongie’s voice is soft yet powerful. Not heard so much as it is felt in his mind. Her tone is feminine and kind, like a mother. Minho knows what’s coming next, not a proper scolding, but something that burns just as badly. “I have received word from Patriarch Soonie that the potential mate the Child Oracle selected for you was not well received.” Although her voice is smooth like emerald wasp jelly, it makes him wince with discomfort nevertheless. Because the chiding is more like a wasp sting than sweet jelly. 

Although he knew that this conversation was a matter of  _ when,  _ not  _ if,  _ he’d hoped that it wouldn’t happen so soon. The bitter taste of the Child Oracle’s last attempt is still bitter in his mouth. The worst part of course, is how complex that bitterness is. Bitter like medicine, and bitter like radon-lemon, and bitter like dark purple leaves that grow in the fields. “Doongie” he regards the elder oracle without her respectful title. After all, they’re quite familiar. “I do not mean to question Dori-Oracle’s vision.” After all the three deities are all knowing and all powerful, if they make a decision, it is not to be questioned. 

“My Child,” there’s fondness in her voice, “Soonie says that I spoil you.” Her tail flops against the royal blue moss, shaking the ground upon which they sit. In stark gentle contrast, her soft, but immensely powerful tail whips around him, pulling him closer to her. 

Her warmth is comforting, and he buries his face into the soft fur of her side. Her whole body vibrates in approval as she purrs. The feeling although familiar, is more comfortable than anything else he’s ever known. 

“But I can see, surprising as it may be, that this is not a match. Tell me, why was the Oracle’s selection unsatisfactory? Speak truthfully.” 

Minho laughs, dry and uncomfortable. “There’s nothing wrong, that’s why I’m afraid to bring it up.” 

Doongie makes a mewling sound of approval. “You have known the Child’ Oracle’s selection for a long time.” 

“Mother said that our pods grew in the same spot upon the same vine, just several years apart.” 

“Yes, and you and Jisung have also always been quite close,” Doongie notes. 

“Yes,” Minho doesn’t quite know how to continue from there. “I always thought that if the oracle chose Jisung as my mate, we’d be so happy.” Strangely, disappointingly, when they’d been granted privacy within the sacred chenille lair after the oracle’s announcement, it was awkward, far worse than his other trips with other potential mates. They were at a loss for words with one another for the very first time. Touches freely given in play were stifled. Uneasy, as if the oracle, who couldn’t be wrong was very, very wrong. 

All signs pointed to them being chosen, soulmates, yet Minho could not envision himself joining hands, binding them with chartreuse silk, and bathing together in the tangerine waters of the sacred lake in marriage. “We should be perfect for one another.” 

Doongie interrupts, “The child oracle’s suggestions are just that, suggestions. Even so, she is quite young and inexperienced.”

In that moment, Minho knows that it’s true, he’s coddled by the cat god. 

“I have known this to happen, we have a name for it.” 

“Really?” 

“Lang-kant.” 

Minho is puzzled by the cat god’s use of ancient language. “Red dot?” 

“If you were to get a small crimson dot upon your white ceremonial robes, even if it were too small to see, even if no one else noticed, just the mere knowledge alone would drive you crazy. Would it not?” 

“I guess so.” 

“The differences between the two of you are small, and even if you cannot describe them, you know that they’re there. 

“Hm,” Minho buries his fingers in the fur now too, seeking out a spot on her back that hearns him a deeper, rumbling purr when he pats it. 

“We believe that you are just particular hearted. That no matter who the oracle selects, she will never be sensitive enough to understand our young prince’s heart.” 

“That’s impossible.” His parents, his siblings, everyone, have had their mates suggested by the oracle. Even if she wasn’t correct the first time around, the second, or in rare cases, third attempt was always successful. 

The oracle has suggested seven potential mates to Minho. 

“We have discussed it, your mother and father agree as well.” The tight nervous feeling in his chest drops heavily into his stomach. “Worry not Minho, we want you to go on a Journey. Search not only the planet, but the solar system. Go on to search this dimension, and the next. Our prince must find a mate that will make him happy. If you cannot find your mate, then you will return home in eighty blip’s time and accept the oracle’s choice for you.” 

* * *

“Minho, what’s wrong?” In his arms he holds the Child Oracle. Silver soft fur fills in the space between his fingers. She latches onto his purple robe and worries deep runs into the fabric with her diamond tipped claws. “Are you not pleased with the alternative we have made for you?” 

“Dori, no.” He pats the divine bottom and waits for purrs of approval. He cannot help but notice that the opal that grows out of her head is clouded and uncharacteristically unclear. “I’m just afraid. I haven’t left home in such a long time. What if I find someone not of our culture, and they do not like wasp jelly, or they’re allergic to cats, or--” 

“It is a lot to consider alone, isn’t it?” The child oracle considers. 

“Yes.” 

“I’ll come with you.” 

“Aren’t you needed here?” But relief immediately washes over Minho at her offer. Just having one companion, one companion who knows him better than anyone else, makes the whole task seem less daunting. Yet, it seems so selfish to tear her away when his people need him. 

“Probably, but I’m only forty blips old. But Soonie and Doongie can remember how things were done beforehand, right?” 

“Maybe, but--” 

The Child Oracle swats her paw against his lips and his jawline in disapproval. Minho promptly quits speaking. 

“It is good for the people if their prince is happy. I can tell, your heart aches with each failed attempt. If I am there, I can approve or disapprove of your choice. You will feel better.” 

“You’ve already decided,” Minho scratches at her chin. 

“I have.” 

* * *

Felix stands at the threshold of his apartment, patting down his pockets. Keys. Phone. Wallet. Or, as his father would say,  _ spectacles, testacles, wallet, and watch.  _ He pushes his feet into his shoes, and god he’s gonna be  _ late.  _

Jetting down the stairs, he approaches, and readies himself to jump  _ over  _ the large puddle that’s gathered at the base of the stairwell and lingered for days, and days, and days. With each passing day, it grows slightly smaller, but never quite enough to disappear completely. Today, because it’s  _ really  _ his day, he underestimates the puddle’s width. His canvas shoes land in water  _ fuck.  _ Then, he notices little black specks scatter. “Oh no.” 

Tadpoles. 

Some negligent frog mom laid her eggs in the puddle instead of a proper lake or pond. 

Felix does the math quickly in his head, realizing that it could take quite a while to catch them all and find something to put them in. 

He’s already gonna be late. 

But he just kind of has to. 

Felix runs upstairs to grab a plastic soup ladle from the kitchen. As for a container….He’s got a mostly empty container of protein powder that Chan left in the trunk of his car. 

Felix throws ten or twenty servings of birthday cake flavored protein powder into the grass, and spends the next thirty minutes chasing tadpoles and spooning them into an oversized container. 

He wishes Chan were here. He’d love this kind of thing. He’d probably be better at it than him too, quickly and efficiently scooping up tadpoles. 

But as it stands, cleaning the puddle takes twice as long. 

* * *

Work, when he finally makes it in, is just as chaotic and disorganized. 

Felix looks at his calendar for the day and immediately regrets it when he sees that almost every minute that he plans to be at work today is blocked off. He’s got three field trip groups coming through today not counting the surprise pre-school group that he just sold a group rate to this afternoon: first, fourth, and worst of all fifth grades. Fifth graders are just at the age where they’re too cool for just about everything,  _ including  _ the Sydney aquarium. It’s been like this for the past week and a half, with every school in the city seemingly  _ just  _ as done as the students. Teachers, so eager to push off responsibility to him. 

Felix opens a manta ray coloring page pdf and prints off seventy five copies, and then attends to his buzzing phone. 

_ Felix  _

Of course it’s Chan. They always text in the morning...Except for like... _ this  _ morning when Felix ran out the door late. 

_ Flix  _

_ I know you’re busy  _

_ Just, five seconds. Pls.  _

Felix pulls down three tupperware boxes from the flaking seafoam blue shelves: crayons, puppets, foam shapes,  _ anything  _ for this afternoon. 

Then, he darts out of the room towards the hab tank. Today is a very, very big day.  _ Ooops. _ Backtracking slightly, his sneakers squeak against the floor. He stops in front of one of the several tanks in the back office. He addresses the horse shoe crab with a broken tail. “Horace, curtain in an hour. Don’t be a diva about it.” 

Felix walks out of the shared educational office, and towards the north end of the aquarium. In an attempt to open up FaceTime, he opens up Facebook, Reddit, and Spotify before successfully making the call. 

Chan picks up right away. “Hey.” 

“Hey!” 

Chan looks best when he’s happy, and after years of knowing one another, he knows that Chan seems to be happiest when he’s near the water. It doesn’t matter if that’s the ocean, the olympic sized pool they used to practice in for hours, or a hundred thousand gallon tank. Ready for the day ahead, Chan wears a wetsuit, a grin, and little else in front of a tank. 

Chan landed an awesome internship at COEX in Seoul. Felix misses him a lot, but can’t blame him at all for taking it. 

“Did I miss it?” 

“I don’t think so?” Felix judges by the throng of his coworkers gathered in front of the tank. A few people in his department shoot him sideways glances at being late, but he knows once they see the jar of tadpoles, they’ll understand. Better yet, once they see that he’s Facetiming Chan, they’ll forget completely. “Okay, I’m turning you around.” Felix mashes the screen and switches the camera. 

“Hey,” the senior trainer calls from up on the ledge. “Is that Chan?” 

“Yeah!” Felix calls back. 

“Okay, we can start! Everybody, give it up for the Admiral!” 

It’s weird, along the same vein as when Chan’s very white, very middle aged neighbor at the old apartment complex had a birthday party for her chihuahua and insisted that they bring Berry. 

But he buys into it this time, and so does Chan. The Admiral is like Chan’s kid. a retired army diving dolphin who was used in research for years and years and years. Opinionated and stubborn, he lives up to his namesake. The senior trainer never lets red shirt employees near dolphins, but somehow Chan, and his charisma and charm wormed his way into sessions. 

Today the old bastard of a dolphin is turning thirteen, practically ancient in dolphin years. 

The senior trainer signals into the tank. The dolphin breaches the water in a single, fluid motion. Bottled nose curiously pokes at the red and white striped ball. Then taking it between his teeth, he swims toward the platform with his head above the water.

The trainer holds neutral position, waiting for the dolphin to slide up onto the platform. 

Every employee at the aquarium sings an asynchronous, but joyful rendition of  _ Happy Birthday  _ to the old dolphin. Chan doesn’t sing in his usual, soothing singing voice, but instead in the voice that’s usually reserved for when he wants to tell embarrassing stories, or when he’s drunk off of one or two beers. Loud, boisterous, and infectious. 

When it’s all over the birthday dolphin gets fed a bounty of mackral. 

“Okay, okay, okay.” Felix switches the phone back. “I have three field trips to finish up before 10:30.” 

“Finish?” 

“Yeah, I found a bunch of tadpoles this morning.” To most people, that wouldn’t explain anything. To Chan, he’s explained  _ everything.  _

“Alright,” Chan sighs. “I love you Felix.” 

“I love you too.” 

* * *

Felix is dead on his feet by the time work is finished. That doesn’t stop him from trudging through the aquarium to sit in front of the large reef tank and watch the fish. Vibrant clown fish drift past alongside portly cowfish, but Felix’s attention is drawn to a cluster of seahorses that have been settled towards the front of the glass for most of the day. 

He’d like to see Molly, the large three legged sea tortoise, but she’s finicky, and likes to hide in her grotto away from glass peering eyes. 

Felix snaps a quick photo of two seahorses intertwined in coral. He captions it, “this is me n u watching tv, seconds before I have to get up and pee.” He sends it to Chan, and then goes back for his tadpoles. 

Felix supposes that he’s kind of trespassing at Diamond Pointe golf course, and Felix also supposes that’s kind of illegal. He comes to this conclusion of course  _ after  _ he’s found the hole in the fence.

Illegal, but it’s close to home. That means he can  _ quickly _ pre-treat the grass stains which he  _ knows  _ are streaked down his back now. Then, after he delivers on his good deed for the day he can sink into the sofa with a french bread pizza. 

“Alright little pollywogs.” It’s not until he’s a few steps out that he realizes the bank is thick mud. 

Holy shit is this the moment he trained rigorously for from ages 6-7? Falling into quicksand? Man, he really thought that was gonna be a bigger  _ thing.  _ “Become beautiful frogs. Become someone’s prince, or uh, princess I guess.” 

Felix moves to dump the container, but as he moves the slick mud slides beneath the soles of his shoes. Desperately, he tries to regain his balance, but it’s too late. 

Felix falls into the pond alongside the tadpoles. 

* * *

The answer that Minho has searched far, and searched wide for, is right here. Which is really convenient for Minho. He hasn’t been on this planet very long, hell, he hasn’t even been gone from home for very long. This is only he and Dori’s third stop, and they made this one because she was hungry. 

Minho walks out in bare feet across plush green.  _ How strange,  _ the grass here is green. Through the trees, and the grass, he spots a boy with the moon and the stars on his head. If there are galaxies upon his face, what if the map of the universe were written across his body? His deep voice, and the heady scent of brackish water and aquatic carrion, only intensifies the sudden and all consuming infatuation that he has for him. 

Crickets chirp in the air, leaves rustle, birds squawk to one another and complain about the summer heat. Minho chirps right back that he agrees, the weather is far too hot. 

“I should at least introduce myself. Oh, maybe you should introduce me. That would be more proper, wouldn’t it?” 

“It would show that you are sincere in your intentions.” 

“What if I look tired from traveling?” Minho cards his fingers through his hair.

“You look fine.” 

A heavy  _ splash  _ interrupts their conversation. Appearances and formalities will have to wait. His bride has fallen into the water, and this is the  _ perfect  _ time for Minho to play the hero. So he bounds across the grass and the water in wind gust motions and pulls the boy out of the water. 

He’s even prettier up close. 

* * *

Felix anticipates the feeling of falling into the water and that total feeling of losing control. 

What he doesn’t anticipate is the feeling of something firm and demanding wrapped around his wrist, dragging him back up, as soon as he goes down. 

But that’s exactly what happens. 

Felix gets dragged upright, and when he opens his pond-water dampened lashes, he’s greeted with the sight of the biggest pair of eyes he’s ever seen. 

Seriously. 

He looks like a cat with blown wide eyes right before they pounce. 

Like a deer stuck in the headlights before she’s smashed into pieces. 

Like an anime girl with big titties. 

And it’s dark as hell outside. There’s no reason he should be able to see the boy’s face, but he does in eerie chartreuse light. And where a normal person might ask, “are you alright?” or at least a more grounded, “hey loser what the fuck are you doing out here?” The stranger speaks to him in a strange garbled tone that sounds like static. 

Felix’s body feels cold in that moment, colder than pond water against his skin. Like the stranger’s voice, his brain feels fuzzy. A feeling creeps over him, that isn’t unlike the time he and Chan accidentally came across a nest of crocodiles in boggy water when they went out for a hike….

_ Run.  _

Felix throws his weight into breaking the stranger’s grip, underestimates his own strength, and falls backwards onto the place where pond-side meets the bank. Floundering for a moment, He pushes himself back onto the grass. Somehow, he manages to right himself, and then he does. 

Felix runs. 

Felix runs across the green, towards the edge of the golf course, and hefts his weight up and over the fence. 

And he doesn’t stop running until he’s home. 

* * *

Because his very terrible, horrible, no good, bad day isn’t over yet, Felix has to strip out of his wet clothes at the door and throw his phone into a bag of rice. 

His only saving grace is that his parents aren’t awake when he finally gets back home. 

After showering, starting laundry, and throwing a French bread pizza in the toaster oven, Felix cracks open his MacBook only to find a slew of messages on Discord from Chan. 

_ Hey you around?  _

_ Did you get the tadpoles home safely?  _

_ I’m so sorry, I have to be at work early tomorrow. So I’m going to bed. Call me when you can.  _

Fuck. Between hangups and time zones, he’s missed his boyfriend. 

Felix types out a several paragraphs long response, detailing his fall into the pond, carefully omitting the stranger who rescued him. Like...what? Was that even real? Or did he hit his head and go through one giant cartoonish hallucination? 

Felix throws on an episode of Futurama that he’s certain he and Chan have watched, or slept through, or fucked through a half dozen or more times before, and pulls the blue and white plate across his comforter. Yes, this is the kind of day that justifies eating in bed. His French bread pizza is covered in sriracha, and just a little burnt the way he likes it, and even though it’s absolute trash, somehow it  _ tastes  _ like a delicacy. 

Probably because he hasn’t eaten since….At that moment, Felix suddenly remembers the sad sandwich that he packed the night before for lunch and subsequently left in the refrigerator when he bolted out the door this morning. 

Okay, so it’s been awhile since he’s eaten. 

When he’s finished, he pushes the plate onto the nightstand and falls back onto his bed. 

He misses Chan. 

_ Like a lot.  _

He misses how on nights like this, no matter how tired they were, he’d make them real food for dinner. He misses Chan’s old apartment, where they had an old, thick flatscreen precariously balanced on the chest of drawers, so they didn’t have to crane their necks to watch Netflix. 

And how Chan would kiss him really soft and slow on nights like this. Pet his hair, rub his scalp, and ask without ever really asking, like he was really and totally fine not having sex if he didn’t really want to. 

But that’s the thing. 

He always, really, wanted to. 

_ Fuck.  _

If they were really tired, Chan would just take their cocks between his hand and jerk them off, or he’d let Chan fuck his thighs while they spooned. Either way it was always good, and he misses it so much. 

Even though they’re apart now, he usually has Chan’s voice, and with it he gets soft instructions on where to touch and for how long. 

Felix stuffs his hand down the front of his sweats. So worked up, so desperate over nothing, a moan spills out of his mouth before he can even catch it. 

That’s the other thing he misses about Chan’s apartment. 

The privacy. 

Felix toys with himself, freeing and sheathing the head of his cock with his foreskin over, and over again.

Even though he touches himself the same way that Chan touches him, it’s not enough. 

Changing his grip, he fists the length of his cock. It’s better, but it’s still, still not enough. 

The full silver moon shines in through his open window, giving him just enough light to rustle around between his pillows, up on the nightstand, and in the space underneath the bed. 

Ah. There it is. 

If it was a slow day, or one of their days off, they’d do it like this. Chan really,  _ really  _ likes to finger him, and it totally works out because Felix really likes to get fingered. Chan would always start off smiling against the shell of his ear and holding him close so they could kiss. Then, turn him over gently so that he lay on his stomach. 

Of course it’s all kinds of different when Felix does this himself. He haphazardly spills lube down his palm, wrist, all the way down to the elbow. Even though his fingers are smaller, it  _ hurts  _ where Chan  _ always, always  _ makes it feel so good. But it’s better than his hand on his cock alone. 

Sometimes Chan would just do it like this, until he came across his stomach without even touching his cock. Sometimes Chan would open him up so they could fuck. 

_ Fuck.  _

Felix slides another finger inside, and although he likes feeling fuller, his fingers just  _ aren’t  _ long enough to reach. 

_ Goddamn it.  _

Just like that, the mountain that he’d been climbing at a breakneck speed, so ready to take the plunge off the top, evens out into a lackluster plateau. 

Felix returns his attention to his cock, tugging furtively, while haphazardly trying to keep his fingers inside. When he  _ finally, finally  _ cums, it has that same feeling of  _ so good _ and  _ not good enough.  _

After he’s wiped his stomach clean, brushed his teeth, and pet the cat, Felix looks outside the window up at the moon and the brilliant stars. Takes comfort in the fact that even though Chan’s far away, he looked up at those same moon and stars tonight. 

“Tomorrow’s gonna be a better day,” he announces to Margaret, his fat, aging gray tabby. 

The silver light of the moon is edged out by a chartreuse halo like light. 

Weird. 

* * *

Minho sits in a tall tree with Dori, thinking about what to do next. Guilt niggles at the back of his mind. This planet, quite remote in nature, does not accept universal currency, and did not understand that the Child Oracle was in their presence, and  _ hungry.  _ Not wanting to  _ repeat  _ what happened on Yopra9, where Dori simply ate a small Yubruter live  _ and  _ whole, when they would not feed the weary travelers, he simply used his soothing powers to subdue the shopkeeper. Then he grabbed a large bucket of meat slathered in orangered sauce. 

How primitive. 

Nevertheless, the food tastes delectable, but they  _ must  _ do something to learn the culture of this planet, especially if Minho’s mate is  _ here.  _

“I have to be less awkward this time.” 

“If he’s in  _ that  _ condition, do you think he’s even going to care?” Dori comments cracking bone between her teeth and chomping on it contentedly. 

It’s true. Although they sit a fair distance from the dwelling, Minho can smell him quite strongly. He still smells of slight algae, but it’s fainter now, edged out by the strong scent of arousal. He’s wearing an artificial citrus scent in an attempt to conceal his intoxicating scent as if he were embarrassed. 

It’s kind of cute. 

And he must be in need of a mate very badly. Only those in heat bathe in stagnant water. 

“I’ll just be honest. I’ll tell him he’s the most beautiful person I’ve ever seen.” No. That sounds cheap even though it’s true. “Uh, what about a poem?” 

“Just be yourself,” Dori suggests. “And remember your translator this time.” 

“Right,” Minho snaps his earrings into place. They should be able to speak to one another now. He only hopes that he’ll get a better chance this time. 

“What if I stink?” 

Just to make certain that his odor isn’t displeasing, he dabs some of the delectable smelling red liquid from the meat and dabs it behind his ears and upon his wrists. The bright red color, a vibrant decoration showing his intent. “How do I smell?” His palms feel sweaty, chest tight, as if he were dying, and somehow he interprets  _ all of this  _ as a good thing. 

“Good enough to eat,” Dori says, her fangs glimmering in the light. 

* * *

Felix expected fitful dreams tonight. And he feels guilty for missing Chan’s call, he’s worried about tadpoles, and he ate junk food right before bed. 

Specifically, he expected fitful hot dreams tonight of Chan and Chan alone. Like yeah, he  _ got off,  _ but it was barely satisfying.

“You’re not Chan.” So it’s somewhat of a surprise, and a little bit disappointing when Felix can’t summon Chan, but instead summons a stranger. But only a little bit disappointing. Because the boy that his minds eye summoned is still quite breathtaking, even if he’s decidedly  _ not  _ Chan.

This nameless dream boy looks at him with the biggest, widest eyes he’s ever seen. His lips pursed into an expression that Felix cannot determine whether or not is a frown or a smile. 

That’s when he recognizes him. “You pulled me out of the pond.” Such a weird thing to dream about. 

“Yeah. I’m Minho” 

He’s in bed with Felix. Curious hands roam his body, pressing against muscle. Not as if he wants to shape Felix’s guideless desire, but simply  _ understand  _ the shape of his body. 

But the exploratory touches do not yield equivalent results. Felix, impossibly horny, simply  _ wants.  _ And if Chan, the object of his desire, cannot be summoned in his dream, then there’s no harm at all in wanting this boy that his subconscious created solely for him. 

Felix is used to the hot summer nights of Sydney. What he isn’t used to is how his room feels greenhouse warm-wet now instead of the drier heat. The faint blue light that constantly streams from his computer case, is replaced by an orange pink neon that illuminates the room, yet still keeps it mysteriously dark. Cool, now his dream is just a Soundcloud vaporwave aesthetic. 

“I’m Felix.” 

“You have the stars across your face Felix.” Minho says to him slowly, his gaze never leaving Felix. 

It’s so weird. 

But it doesn’t stop Felix from reaching forward to meet his touch, cradle his face, and pull him properly on top of him. 

They’re closer now, and the hot-humid feeling of his room is edged out by the cold feeling of Minho’s body on top of him. 

“You smell like chicken, Minho,” because even in his dreams, putting his foot in his mouth is objective number one. Getting lucky is secondary. 

Instead of getting what he wants, the scene before him cuts out. Molten hot touches are replaced with walls that are simultaneously made of fine jade, and also made of finely woven tapestry. A gray kitten stands before him. Between her eyes rests a tumultuous opal. 

A woman’s voice, strong and commanding booms, “ _ Felix.”  _

“YES?” He recoils in fear, brushing against velvet jade as he attempts to flee. 

Then, the kitten before grows ten, fifteen times its original size. Multiple tails flick side to side, shooting blue lightning across soft green jade. Her eyes become solid ember red. 

It’s kind of terrifying, but he  _ knows that _ his lesser, horny brain wants to see this dream through rather than drag him to consciousness. 

“Minho has chosen you as his companion for the evening. I, the child oracle, have chosen you as his mate.” 

“Okay, cool.” Oh this is real weird.

Then, he’s transported back to his bedroom. The bright orange light is muted now. His own, and Minho’s voices are muted now too, as if his ears are underwater. He can hear the tones of words, but not their shapes. 

But he feels them now, just under his skin. 

“You smell like moss.” 

“I fell into a pond.” His limbs feel heavy, but he manages. “You saw me.” Wraps his arms around Minho’s waist and draws him near. The garment that he wears his quite thin, and he’s pleased to discover that he’s just as hard as Felix. 

“God that’s hot.” 

Maybe it’s better if they don’t talk anymore. Felix leans forward, closes his eyes, ready for the kiss that he so badly wants. 

Somehow, it doesn’t happen. Minho, determined to be the most frustrating boy of his dreams, licks a long stripe from his jawbone to his eyelid. “Oh, come on, Minho what the hell?” 

“It is customary to--” He’s a dream boy, so Felix doesn’t have to be as nice as he would in waking life. He’s a dream version of himself, so Felix doesn’t have the same inhibitions that he does in waking life. Felix grabs either side of his face and kisses him square on the mouth. 

Minho quickly catches on, parting his mouth for Felix immediately, letting Felix slip his tongue inside. He tastes spicy, like Nandos, and inexplicably sweet. Thick and plastic like, it reminds him of the blue raspberry lollypops he used to get with his mom at the bank.

“You’re in heat,” Minho settled firmly between his legs now, grinds the heel of his palm across Felix’s crotch still woefully clothed. 

Shamefully, he can’t help but roll his hips upward into the touch. “Uh, I mean it certainly feels that way.” 

Another, sloppy kiss. Their teeth clink together, lips misalign. Desperately, he tries to sit up to switch their positions. Minho pushes back, and in that tumultuous push and pull it feels very much like he and Minho are going to shove one another out of bed and onto the carpet. 

As what happens in dreams so often in dreams, the blink of an eye, Minho’s naked. Naked and on top of him. The garment wrapped around his body, seemingly disappeared into thin air. 

It’d be so nice if he could summon the same effect for himself, but he can’t. So he writhes out of his clothes clumsily. Minho, seemingly frustrated with the way Felix removes his sweats, lifts his hands up underneath his shirt, and simply tears it away. 

As what happens so often in dreams. 

For a moment, all they can do is stare at one another’s naked bodies in dreamsicle orange light. Minho’s cock is uncannily unhuman, despite its normal color, and normal length. Although the head was similar in shape to his own, the glans were noticeably different, ridged on the end. At the base, the skin grows visibly more swollen than the rest with each passing moment. 

Minho stares at his cock as well, and it’s a common response that he’s gotten whenever he travels overseas. He’s never gotten to reciprocate that look until now. He’s honestly shocked given how  _ simple,  _ his uncut dick looks in comparison to Minho’s. 

The way their hands move is magnetic and automatic. Hands upon one another’s cocks, they play with one another. Soft touches across the heads of their cocks that send shivers down their spines. Precum smeared across the head and down the shaft, as friction, nonexistent, fades out into glorious skin against skin contact. 

Strange, how his skin tingles after making contact with Minho’s precum. 

Soon, Minho’s attention is drawn elsewhere, further down. First, cupping his balls in his palms, testing the weight and caressing the soft skin beneath. Then, lower still pressing against the skin of his perineum. 

“Oh, my little blobfish” Minho husks into his ear as if it were a term of endearment akin to darling or sweetheart. “Let me fuck you. You need me to take care of you.” 

And in that moment, Felix truly feels like,  _ yeah. He really does.  _

“You don’t taste like you have ukaw glands, I don’t want to hurt you.” Felix watches in rapt fascination, as Minho takes two of his fingers into his mouth, and sucks on them. Obscene squelching sound escapes the corner of his mouth as he sucks on the digits, coating them with viscous pinkish tinted saliva. The sigh that slips from Minho’s mouth, content, as is the gaze that he casts through heavy lidded eyes and long lashes. 

“Wow,” that’s about all Felix can muster. He fists his own cock fitfully, and waits for what comes next. 

Minho makes a satisfied sigh, before leaning over him, and kissing him once more. “Turn over, let me take care of you now.” 

Felix does as he’s told in the same sluggish, dream like motions. The reality of everyday life seeps into fantasy. Other than his fingers, he’s not gone all the way in awhile, and he worries. 

“Don’t worry, please.” Minho hovers over him, licking another long, unapologetic stripe down the side of his face. 

Felix  _ feels  _ the soft pad of Minho’s finger glide against his hole, the friction minimal due to the thick liquid over his fingers. Much like contact with his precum made Felix’s hand tingle, the skin that Minho touches now feels more sensitive, his sense of touch heightened. Despite this, his body does not go rigid, or clench abruptly when the  _ pressure  _ of his finger finally breaches him. 

All of the intensity, and none of the initial discomfort. 

“Good boy,” Minho whispers into his ear, while ruffling his hair. Soon, there’s more pressure as he adds  _ another  _ finger. 

The tingling, heightened feeling, doesn’t feel concentrated anymore. It’s not just on his fingers, but coursing through his body. Felix feels glowing warmth in the tips of his fingers, and toes and in the flush red blush that certainly dusts his cheeks. 

“Minho--oh--ah that feels really good.” When he humps against his sheets in desperation, it doesn’t have the same frustrating, almost scratchy drag of sensitive skin against cheap cotton that it usually does. Instead, it feels electric, complimenting each curl of his fingers as Felix pushes back against Minho. 

“It’s going to feel even better. I’m going to make the stars light up on your face.” Minho sounds so satisfied. “Felix, I can’t wait anymore.” His long fingers slide out, and Felix doesn’t even have the time to mourn the feeling of emptiness. Immediately, he can feel the press of Minho’s cock against his hole. 

If he knows that if this were reality he’d have asked to stop. Minho would’ve been too big, and slid in too fast. But he pushes back on Minho’s cock as soon as he feels the head breach his rim. So sudden, but so good, that’s how he knows that all of this is a dream. 

Like the sound of his own heart beating in the shells of his red hot ears, he can feel each pulse of Minho’s cock deep inside of him. Everything feels sticky wet, and obscene. Liquid leaks out of his hole when Minho pulls out and drives his cock back inside. It drips down his thighs, and the sheets become sticky damp beneath their bodies. Rising above the sounds of their comingled moans, is the visceral and bodily sound of skin slapping against skin. 

Hands across his chest pull him upward into a kneeling position. “Gods, you’re so pretty,” breathed into his ear. Minho nips at the soft lobe before licking with the flat of his tongue against his jaw. 

Minho touches his cock with silken-vice grip and it only intensifies the immense feeling of pleasure that builds, and builds tightly within his body, but does nothing to seemingly bring him  _ closer.  _ “Minho,” it might be the first time he’s said his name. 

“Felix, I’m gonna,” and as Minho gasps it into his ear, he can  _ feel  _ everything change. Minho’s cock swells  _ larger,  _ Felix feels  _ somehow  _ fuller despite the fact that he felt as if Minho’s body pushed him to the absolute limit already. 

Only then does Felix cum into Minho’s hand, and across his own stomach in short, powerful bursts. 

They’re stuck like that for awhile, with Minho buried deep inside of him. Minho’s cock doesn’t get softer. He doesn’t  _ feel  _ emptier. 

His cat Margaret walks across the bed in their post coital haze, and Minho leans over to pet her. 

Minho speaks to him in a hushed tone in words that he cannot understand. The secrets confessed to her, will remain as such, because even if she blabs, Felix will never know for certain.

“Felix, Margaret says you’re in love.” At that, Minho pulls out of him roughly, abruptly. It’s unexpected when he’s been so close. It’s the sudden kind of abrupt motion that’s really only done when you want to get away from someone.

Felix gasps in surprise. 

But he answers, without question “I am.” 

“Tell me about him.” 

“His name is Chan. We’ve been friends for forever. We only started dating last year. He’s like, the nicest person in the world.” Is this his mind’s way of guilting him for having dream sex? “He’s got like, the most amazing body…” There’s plenty of more concrete things that he loves about Chan, but his mind feels fuzzy. 

“He sounds great.” For a visage, the way that Minho wilts under his touch feels so real. The defeat in his voice, as Felix confesses nothing less than the truth, his feelings for Chan, sounds so real. 

“ He is.” 

Minho kisses his red bruised lips with just as much need, and just as much urgency as their first. Thourgough, repetitious, as if he’s trying to memorize the swell of Felix’s lips and the shape of his body, the way that it feels underneath his hands. Blue raspberry flavor is thick in his mouth. Everything feels heavy again, to the point of drowsiness. 

Minho speaks, and despite hearing nothing other than static, Felix understands what he says, “he’s lucky to have you.” 

* * *

Felix wakes long after his alarm, long after he’s usually up and out for his morning run, long after his morning biodiversity class.  _ Fuck.  _

Peering over the edge of his bed, Margaret looks at him with wide, almost frightened eyes. 

His bed linens are messy, as if he’d tossed and turned all night. The fitted sheet popped off the corners. 

God, what a fucked up dream. 

Running his fingers first though his matted hair, and then across his cheek bones, his fingers meet something sticky near his mouth. Pulls his hand back to reveal something thick and pink on the tips of his fingers.  _ Okay.  _

Pulls back the sheet, and finds more of the same dried substance across the v of his hips. Felix is concerned, but doesn’t know  _ what to do  _ to ease the fear that wells in his gut. He moves to get out of bed, wash the sticky pink stuff from his legs and his face only to have a sharp poking sensation in his thigh. 

Felix pulls back, and reveals a Nando’s toothpick flag in his sheets. 

_ What the fuck.  _


	2. Chapter 2

He’s ready to bind their hands together in chartreuse fabric, and get married in the sacred tanzanite chamber. He's traveled so far in two short archyles and met so many people: beautiful, smart, and kind. So many so hypothetically worthy of the title of  _ mate.  _ None of them, none of them caught his attention the way that Felix did. 

But he’s in love with someone else. 

And he cannot think of any greater cultural taboo. __

So his heart aches, radiates pain unlike anything he’s ever known. 

Dori yeowls at him late at night when he’s sleeping in the traveling craft, “go after him, it’s not wrong if he wants you back. Prove it. Prove that you’re better than this Chan guy.” and then ignores him when he wakes and sleepily asks her for advice. 

Uncertain of what to do next, Minho stands in the middle of a chaotic throng of children. Some of them roll on the ground and others with their faces pressed against glass. The shorter ones don't pay attention, and stumble in the darkness. 

All around him, laughter and shrieks of surprise, and crying so much crying.

Although his attention is for the most part dedicated to what lies beyond the clear barrier before him, he keeps an eye out for wobbly podlings who are just the right height to bash their heads against the railing. Although he is a prince, he’s not above wiping away the toxic ooze that seeps from their faces if one wanders away from their group and becomes frightened. 

When they grow outside of the pod like this, he cannot decide if children are cute or if they’re hideous. 

All he knows is that he likes it  _ here  _ very much. He’d probably like it  _ even if  _ his mate--No that’s dangerous thinking...He’d probably like it even if Felix  _ didn’t  _ spend most of his days here. 

In this place, it is as if the ocean had been parted and halted right before his very eyes. He sees creatures that remind him of home. The long, sharp toothed fish are reminiscent of the lap pets favored by stylish women. His mother owns four. 

The bright blue fish remind him of the hovering pests that linger around food that's been left out too long, although the people here seem to like them.

And some of them he's never seen anything like before. Brilliant bright yellows and hues of purple billow outward, and he learns that these pillowing, fluttering creatures are called anemone. It’s interesting really, how these creatures can sting and protect at the same time. 

He knows that Felix is here, somewhere within these walls of water and glass. He can smell him. Faint at first as he progressed through the many rooms with aquatic creatures, he was pulled deeper and deeper into this strange, hollowed out aquatic cave. 

Then he grew distracted by the unending blue beauty in front of him. The fish look like living gems sewn onto an ocean’s tapestry. 

Felix’s scent remained steady as he remained motionless. 

Then, he’s here all at once, to the point of being thick on his tongue. 

In the dark, Minho cannot see the finer features of his face. Just the sharp outline of his jaw and the bob of his Adam's apple as he swallows thickly. The smell radiates on the boy standing next to him amid the chaos: on his palms, the nape of his neck, and his mouth. 

"If you go to the upper level, it's a little bit quieter," his exotic deep voice is just as smooth as Minho remembers. "There's like a bench up there. And uh you have about forty minutes of quiet time before I bring the next group through there."

"Thank you." It’s such a small gesture. Hell, Felix probably doesn’t even know that it’s him in the darkness. But a blush rises to his face nevertheless, and he can only imagine how warm-chartreuse his face has become. 

Felix’s eyes linger upon him. He can feel their weight, and that too makes his confidence swell dangerously larger, like maybe he can get what he wants. 

“Have we met before?” 

“You’re my husband, did you forget to take your amnesia pills today?” 

Felix laughs like it’s a joke even though Minho is dead serious. At home, seasonal chromium storms make everyone stupid. One time he forgot his pills and got lost in his own garden. But he’ll let the transgression slide, because the sound of Felix’s laughter is the most amazing thing. Still booming and deep, but somehow light and airy. The sound makes his ears ring in the most amazing kind of way. 

“Smooth.” And then, “Sorry, you just seem really familiar.” 

Maybe he’s just shy, and doesn’t want to be so forward. Most people on this planet haven’t made contact with the outside planet yet, and they seem to be quite shunned if they have. “Well, where I come from, that means we’ve met in our dreams.” 

Felix’s expression falls into one of confusion, and then his mouth draws into a firm line. It’s a new expression, one that Minho isn’t certain that he likes seeing on his mate’s face. “Maybe so.” 

“So you’ll come sit with me if I go down there?” 

“I’m working right now.” His voice sounds different now. Flustered meets frustrated, and not really in a good way. 

Minho’s messed up, but he’s not exactly certain how. 

* * *

Felix has dealt with a lot of weird patrons over the past few years. After all, thousands of people pass through Sydney aquarium, and not all of them can be as painfully normal as the acne faced teens that make jokes straight to his face about tentacle porn. 

But _Cat Boy,_ as the docent girls call him, has got to be the strangest. 

And it's not just because Felix is pretty sure that he pulled him out of a pond once. It’s not because or when he blushes his whole face turns green, not like he’s about to barf, but like he cracked a glow stick and rubbed it all over. Or even because Felix is pretty sure that he had a bizarre, but viscerally weird dream about him. 

He’s also here like...a lot. A lot more than their usual regulars, families with a  _ lot  _ of kids, and grandparents that like to walk around the big tank, the one that’s starts three stories high and winds all the way back down to the ground floor. 

He’s on two out of three strikes right now with aquarium security, cause he’s gotten caught a couple of times bringing in a little gray kitten in a tote bag. 

Like three, four times a week,  _ a lot _ . 

When it isn’t too busy, sometimes Felix will sit with him during his break. 

“Hey Minho.” There are seats open along the many benches in front of the tanks. Tourists still push through, but it’s the closest to dead it’s ever gonna get. “How’s Dori?” 

“That’s a trick question.” But Minho gives himself right away, clutching the weathered tote bag that he’s never without close to his chest. 

Today, Minho’s camped out in front of the Dugong tank. 

“Uh huh.” He’s not supposed to spend his breaks out here like this. But, it’s not likely he’ll get in trouble. After all, it’s the closest thing they’ll ever be to dead here. He sits on the other end of the long bench, and rips open a string cheese package with his teeth. 

Between his thumb and forefinger he has the tiniest pinch of cheese. He leans over. Minho relaxes against the tote bag, and a purposeful gray paw swipes up the cheese. 

Felix can’t say that they’re friends. Can you be friends if the bulk of your interactions consist of a weird sex dream, and watching security escort him off the premise? 

But they’re something like friends. 

“You know he’s really lonely?” Minho gestures to  _ Pig,  _ the aquarium’s only dugong. 

Felix doesn’t spend enough time here. If it hadn’t been for Minho, how many more weeks would have gone by until he finally got the chance to sit and wonder about the nonsensical miracle that is the dugong? How does something get so fat eating only leafy greens? How does something shaped like a rock float so buoyantly instead of sinking to the bottom? 

“We used to have two, but the other one died,” that was back when Chan started working here. 

“I know, he told me,” Minho responds with a certain kind of tone in his voice. Like he knew. Not like he knew because he’d been here dozens of times and read the placard, but because he’d uncovered this the way that you only can after hours of getting close with someone. Like he’d really talked to Pig about it. “He said he had this crosshatch scar on his back from a boat. He’s afraid he’ll forget how it looked. You know all the lines.” 

That’s not something that just anyone would know. 

Then, as if Minho senses the heaviness in the air now, he breaks the tension. “He also says that he farted a lot, so he doesn’t miss that so much.” 

At that, both of them laugh. 

Felix takes the rest of his string cheese and shoves it into his mouth. With his mouth still kind of full he confesses, “I saw some bandicoots when I was out hiking the other night.” He’s told pretty much everyone that he knows at that point, but he can’t help it. He thinks they’re so cool. 

“That’s really cool.” 

“Yeah.” 

“Yeah.” 

Without the usual throngs of people, the viewing room smells like the chemicals they use to process and treat the water and make it suitable for the animals. 

Felix moved over to sneakily feed Dori string cheese, but he never slid back to the other side of the bench. Suddenly, he’s very aware of how close he still is to Minho. 

“I know where some bandicoots live.” 

“Yeah?” 

“Yeah. Do you wanna come see them sometime?” 

The answer should of course be a simple, and automatic “no.” But Felix’s brain is really good at taking all of his careful thoughts and repurposing them into reckless words. “Sure.” 

* * *

Minho lays out in a patch of dry grass _.  _ He’s probably not supposed to be here. That happens to Minho a lot. Humans like rules, and if the humans who run the place catch him out here’ they’ll yell at him, or threaten to, “call the police.” Whatever that means. 

Felix stood him up. 

He’s been casting his invitational light out across the clearing, up over the trees, until it laps into the sky in brilliant jewel tones for hours now. He keeps doing it, because he foolishly believes that Felix will come to him. 

In preparation, he coaxed a few dozen bandicoots out of their dens, promising that Dori has been well fed, and that the rumors they’ve heard about what she did to the sugar gliders the other night are just that, rumors. 

Now they’re asking too many questions as they run across his chest and his legs. 

Some of them bring him grubs and spiders and encourage him, “if you’re sad, eat your feelings.” It’s tempting, but once he got started, he’d never stop. His mother never let them keep larvae of any kind in the house for fear that he’d grow up chubby. Now that he’s an adult, it’s so easy to overindulge. 

“Where is this guy anyway? If Felix loves him so much, why isn’t he here?” Dori questions as she jumps down, onto his chest from a low hanging branch, nearly knocking the wind out of him. 

_ Oof.  _ Taken by surprise, Minho’s light changes from green to tangerine light. The contrast makes the green of the trees look dull brown, but makes bandicoot fur look shining gold. 

“What kind of husband just leaves his boywife for days at a time? Go find this guy, kick his ass, and demand Felix’s hand.” Dori kneads the royal chest with her paws. While this is typically a rite of comfort, its clear that the Child Oracle takes her anger out on him. Sharp claws dig into the thin fabric of his clothes, snag, and pop much to her purring satisfaction. 

Minho wearily raises his hand to scratch underneath her chin. “You are literally an oracle. My guiding spirit. My conscience. Why are you so determined to break all the rules?” 

“Who makes the rules?” 

“Your parents--” and then suddenly it all becomes clear to Minho. The Child Oracle wants to rebel, perhaps at his expense. “Hey, don’t bring me into whatever you’ve decided you’re mad at them about.” Minho didn’t have a rebellious period with his parents. He grew on the pod for so long, that it didn’t seem worth his time. Even now it’s hard to understand Dori’s ire. 

“Uh, I’m mad that their rules are stupid. If you want Felix, show him. Go kick this Chan guy’s ass.”

During the argument, the bandicoots have all but scattered back into the brush and into their burrows. 

It’s kind of metaphorical right? Minho had a good thing going with the bandicoots, and then his cat sticks her nose in where it doesn’t belong and ruins everything. 

“And, that’s not gonna make him like me more. Really, it will just make him like me less.” 

“You wanted someone. You found someone.” 

“I think I am gonna go find this guy.” 

“Oooh,” Dori digs her claws into Minho’s chest in excitement. 

Minho winces in pain, but persists with the truth, even if he knows that his furry torturer will not like it. “I’m just gonna make sure. I’m gonna go make sure he loves Felix back. When I know, I’ll leave him alone. We’ll go to some other planet. We’ll figure it out.” 

It’s a fine plan. Perfectly fine. Absolutely. Completely acceptable really. The best one he’s had in solar cycles really. 

That is until Felix comes crashing through the brush.

* * *

“Chan, you are not gonna believe this.” Felix rocks back in the patio chair, and looks out upon his lawn. 

His mom wandered outside in her pajamas snapping photos. The neighbors have gathered in little clusters outside of their homes, but never venture over to one another to confirm what they’re seeing isn’t a very strange dream. 

The only thing that he can compare it to is something like the photos he’s seen of Northern Lights. Brilliant lights move across the sky in ethereal amorphousness, like a plume of smoke snaking, blossoming, and dissipating across a room. First in green, and then in orange, and then a vibrant, almost aggressive shade of pink. 

It’s the kind of thing that would be beautiful if Felix didn’t know the cause. 

Felix switches the camera and pans out across the lawn and up into the sky. 

On the screen, Chan leans forward in his chair, pressing his face closer to the camera as if that were going to help him see more clearly. 

Chan asks, “do you think it’s--” his voice crackles with interrupted laughter. 

“No say it.” He turns the camera back so that they can face one another once more. 

“Aliens?” Chan whispers. 

“Yes, and in this particular Earth invasion movie, I’m playing the role of the cool and detached guy who seems mostly useless.” Felix takes a contemplative draught of grape soda from a dented aluminum can to prove his point. 

“Until you spit out a really useful piece of advice on the fly at the end.” 

“That everyone could’ve used hours ago.” Felix rises from the table, metal patio chair scraping loudly across the concrete. Minho is out there somewhere calling to him with a wordless plea that speaks volumes. The whole city, captivated by the shining lights spilled across the jet black sky, only for him. 

“So what are you gonna really do?” 

“I think I’m gonna go recast myself as the guy who just go blindly follows the light like I don’t know any better,” Felix responds confidently. 

“Good luck.” 

“Thanks, I’ll need it.” 

Then, like the rest of the neighborhood, as if he’d never set eyes upon Minho’s chartreuse blushing face, as if he’d never felt slightly nauseous after staring into the fiery opal embedded into his kitten’s head, Felix moves across the grass as if he did not move under his own volition. 

Bare feet glide against the damp blades and tickle the arches. His whole body piques with gooseflesh and a familiar chill settles into his body. 

He crosses the yard into the thin band of trees that separate the neighborhood from the street. Although the cool of the night has long since settled in, the pavement feels hot against his toes. Onward he presses, ducking through an empty lot, and someone’s backyard. 

Where else, of all the places on this green and blue Earth would he end up, other than the golf course? The answer is quite simple. 

Nowhere. 

He walks across the green, past the pond where they first met, and into the line of trees that lead into the woods. More bandicoots than he’s ever seen in his entire life spill from their burrows out into the open, as if they feel just as compelled as Felix. 

And when he sees Minho in the clearing, it’s expected, and it’s a surprise. Of course, in situations such as this, matters of the heart, there’s only one thing that he can say. “What the hell?” 

Caught red handed, Minho falters from his precarious position. Hundreds of pinecones, gathered from around the woods, spill out of a large neon basin. Where the typical person would have a wide eyed expression, Minho’s is flat. Not as if he expected Felix, but  _ should  _ have expected Felix given the circumstances. 

“Felix,” Minho breathes. Minho drops the pine cones gathered in his hands. 

“Minho--” Felix feels out of breath, as if his body just realized how far he’d traveled to get here now. “What are you doing? Is this your spaceship?” 

“Spaceship? What is this the late ginzok era?” Minho scoffs. “I mean--” Minho’s expression sours as he realizes the ways in which he’s revealed himself. 

As if Felix didn’t already know. 

Like a magnet to steel, Felix feels so drawn to him now. In fact, it almost feels strange that at one time, not so long ago, he ran from Minho. He’s just as afraid now as he was then. Maybe even more so. Heart rattling in it’s cage, legs wobbling with each tentative step, but compelled doesn’t even begin to describe the way that he feels right now. 

Felix presses his palm to Minho’s cheek, and it reminds him of when he would press his hands against the static of the old television in his grandmother’s house. In response to Felix’s tenderness, Minho flushes dark purple. “Minho, now’s the part where you ask me if I believe in aliens. Like you know, if this were a movie.” 

“What’s a movie?” 

“It’s like this thing with moving pictures and--” Felix’s mouth curls into a smile, there’s no use concealing it. “That’s not the part that matters Minho.” 

“Felix, are you aware that the Inter-Pangial Tribunal Alliance.” Minho leans closer to him now so that their foreheads are pressed together. “Has identified three-hundred, twenty six thousand planets in the known universe that bear life of some kind?”

“Well,” Felix swallows thickly, and wets his lower lip with his tongue. “I guess I am now.” 

“You came.” Minho’s green blush has faded out to purple. His eyes, always so big and so expressive, are blown wider now. 

“Yeah.” 

“Because you wanna be with me or--” 

Felix came out here prepared to talk. An answer wells up in his throat like a knot. Because his brain is really good at mixing up all his thoughts in a blender and making him choke on the slush. 

Because Felix knows what’s about to happen, or at least he thinks that he does. Minho seems so sweet and so vulnerable that it seems inevitable. 

Minho moves in so close to him that he can feel his breath. He moves, not toward his mouth but towards the side of his face. He drags his tongue from Felix’s jaw across his cheek. 

Felix fully expects Felix to lick the side of his face once more. Instead, and much to his surprise, Minho goes in for a kiss, timid and chaste, as if he remembered something important, but didn’t feel comfortable doing it himself. 

Their lips barely meet. Felix would like to believe that the kiss is something that’s equal parts himself and Minho, but much like the sight of jewel toned lights and soft gray kittens, it’s hard to believe that it’s real. After all, can you really kiss at all if that kiss is so soft that it barely registers as such? If he doesn’t even fully realized that they’ve kissed until after it’s happened? Just the phantom static touch, and never the electric pop when they part. 

"I’m glad you’re here, but,” Minho laps sloppily across his parted lips before capturing him another kiss. This one, more empassioned to the point of being fervent. “There’s something I have to do. Something I have to figure out. I'm really sorry." Minho’s whisper is like a shout as impossible promises are made, “I’ll make it up to you.” 

Can it really be an apology if it’s uttered before Minho even takes the time to see if he’s committed a transgression? What Minho gives him is just the flash, and never the polaroid to prove that it’s true. 

And in that flash, Felix is left alone in the darkness wondering if any of it was real at all. 

* * *

Chan expected fitful dreams tonight, after all that Felix told him. Chan expected fitful hot dreams tonight, dreams that hung on the precipice of anger and want, dreams of another man touching Felix all over when he knew that he couldn’t be there to touch him himself. 

The side of him that's nothing less than human hates the very thought. Felix is his. Not in the way in that his possessions are  _ his,  _ but in the way that he knows every freckle and every curve of his body. In the way that he knows just what to do if Felix feels anxious and his fingers fly to his neck to check his pulse. In the way that Felix knows all of the same little details about him, and that makes him Felix’s too. 

The side of him that's nothing more than human understands. He doesn’t like it, but he understands. It runs deeper than any place his mind can ever wander. He can always change his mind if he really wants to, but he can’t change what’s in his cells. He knows that the right person can make even the cold dark universe feel small and warm. And he certainly understands how Felix would be that person for someone else. 

Chan expected fitful dreams tonight, as the opposing sides of  _ nothing more  _ and  _ nothing less  _ of his consciousness waged war against his heart. 

So its somewhat of a surprise, and ever so welcome when in his dreams he summons Felix. 

Even though they send photos or FaceTime almost every day, Felix’s smile is somehow brighter than he remembers. 

“Chan.” 

“Felix.” 

Their embrace is a fast, but purposeful half second pause before they kiss one another. Felix seems caught by surprise by the suddenness, by the hunger. His mouth pressed partially open against his own lips, Chan takes the opportunity when it’s given and deepens the kiss almost instantly. 

Because he wants. 

Because Felix wants. 

They break the kiss, but only because Chan wants more. He buries himself in the crook of Felix’s neck and kisses him right on his pulsepoint. 

“God, I’m having such a good dream.” 

“You’re having a good dream?” Chan husks into the shell of his ear. “This is my dream.” 

“We can have the same dreams Chan.” 

Chan looks about their surroundings. They’re in his old apartment in Sydney, the one that he gave up for the internship. He’s got Felix pinned to the wall in the short gangway between the kitchen and the living room. Through the wooden beads that hang from the ceiling and divide the two rooms, he can see Berry staring at them with her head cocked to the side.

It smells like garlic bread in the apartment, the kind that comes frozen in a box. Because there’s lots of things they could’ve cooked for date night, but it always went back to pasta. 

This place doesn’t exist anymore, at least not how they remember it. It’s rented out to another person now. The wooden beads hang in the doorway to Felix’s room now. Yet and still, Chan tells Felix, “I don’t think this is a dream.” 

Felix’s hands roam across his chest, tracing the lines of his muscles, framing the logo on his t-shirt. Then, when he realizes that Chan is looking at him, he casts his gaze downward quickly. Wetting his lower lip with his tongue before he speaks, he confesses “I hope you’re right.” 

“Me too.” 

“Um,” Felix looks up at him with pleading eyes. “We’re good right?” 

“Felix, you can fuck a hundred Nandos loving aliens if it means I can see you.” He and Felix  _ fit  _ together. Chan’s just big enough, and Felix, just small enough that Chan can palm his ass, grab him up, and carry him across the room. “Don’t worry about it. We should make the most of our time together either way. Right?” 

“Right.” 

The long chain of beads in the doorway drag across their shoulders and fall back with a clack against the wall. Chan interrupts their kisses only to ask, “so, what do you miss the most about me?” 

“Fingers.” Felix answers him without hesitation, even though a bright crimson blush stains his cheeks. “Yours reach.” 

“Other things reach too!” But Chan knows that they’ll both get what they want. He lets Felix back down onto the carpet, and they remove one another’s clothing quickly. 

Felix kneels upon the sofa so that he faces the window which overlooks the apartment courtyard. The window is open, and the cheap plastic venetian blinds sway ever so slightly in the breeze. 

This place doesn’t exist anymore, but the  _ living room  _ lube is still right where they left it, buried underneath two or three fleece blankets stuffed into the hollow ottomon Chan’s been lugging around from dorm to apartment to apartment throughout college. 

Haphazardly, he drops the bottle, and then can’t seem to get the cap off. 

Felix intervenes, squeezing lube into his hand. 

“Thanks. My brain feels so cloudy right now. Like I’ve never done this before.” 

“You remember just fine to me.” 

Felix is so tight that a finger feels impossible, let alone  _ more.  _ But he knows that his body can, and will accept more. 

Felix seals his mouth over Chan’s in encouragement. “More.” 

“More?” 

“Chan, ‘m ready.” 

So Chan does as he’s told, watching in rapt fascination as he sinks a second digit deep inside of Felix. He’s rewarded with a sigh that sounds more of relief than it does of discomfort or urgency. “This is what you wanted huh?” 

A soft pink blush dusts Felix’s cheeks, acting for a backdrop for the numerous freckles that dot his face. Felix is the kind of cute that makes his cheeks warm and his cock twitch. “Ye-ah. Every night. Think of you.” 

“What did you miss the most about me?” 

Unlike Felix, Chan is slower to respond. The answer comes to him when, in consideration, he circles his boyfriend’s nipple with the pad of his finger, feeling the flesh firm beneath. 

A moan spills from Felix’s mouth, and then he knows. “How sensitive you are.” 

He doesn’t tease Felix; he doesn’t touch relentlessly for the sole purpose of making him cum. He just wants to make Felix feel good, and if he can do that with the practiced motions of his fingers, then that’s exactly what he’ll do. 

The conversation becomes a cacophony of sighs, frequently interrupted by kisses, and spoken over with louder, much more urgent moans. 

“Chan--” it’s not a request, but a command. One that Chan chooses to defy with another purposeful curl of his fingers. “Chan, c’mon.” 

“Yeah. Do you think we should?” 

“Yeah,” Felix responds. “Just in case.” Then he reaches for the small, blue plastic case in the windowsill and uscrews the lid. 

Chan knows that Felix is right, but makes a disgruntled noise nevertheless. He hates the taste of copper, and he hates the fact that he’s overly cautious, even in their dreams. 

They shuffle about, getting everything into place. The tan cover on the sofa slides down exposing a yellowed floral pattern beneath. Felix whimpers when he pulls his fingers out, and Chan  _ almost  _ feels guilty for it. 

“I love you.” Felix tells him over his shoulder. It’s such a raw and earnest thing to say, but Felix says it with such need, it makes Chan pause. 

With dick in hand, pressed against Felix’s hole, time stops for Chan. 

But a roll of Felix’s hips push him forward until he’s buried deep inside. His voice sounds distorted when he tells Felix, “Love you too.” 

For a moment, all Chan can do is breathe and focus on the feeling of Felix tight around him. He closes his eyes and drowns in the feeling. Rakes his hands across Felix’s toned stomach trying his best to memorize where the hard lines end and the softer swaths of skin begin. Breathe in deeply, because right now there is no greater intoxicant than the smell of Felix’s shampoo. How many times? How many times did he take this for granted? 

Fuck, it’s only been maybe, three months? But it feels like forever, and he stands by what he says. It feels like he’s forgotten everything, and he feels everything anew. 

When he opens his eyes once more, he doesn’t focus on the sight of his cock buried deep inside of Felix, but instead the sight of their hands interlaced, his palm against the back of Felix’s hand pressed into the top of the sofa. Closing his eyes, he listens to the sound of Felix’s breath, holds close to him the sensation of Felix tight around him.

When they’re finished, Chan lays on his back on the couch, and pulls Felix down on top of him. They’re both still sticky. The clock in the kitchen, a gift that he didn’t really want from a relative he didn’t really know, chimes with the prerecorded bird chirps, a different one for each hour. 

“Hey,” Felix always falls asleep right after sex. Chan is okay with being pinned beneath him, having the chance to touch him, to hold him. Chan is surprised to hear his voice, heavy and slurred as if he were fighting off exhaustion with each breath. “How will we know?” 

“Huh?” 

“How will we know for sure, if it’s a dream or not?” 

Chan raises his free hand towards the ceiling and reaches for cobwebs that would need to be knocked down with a broom if the situation were different. He’s wearing the woven puka shell bracelet that he put on his wrist years ago when he and Felix drove out to Gold Coast to surf and never took off. 

Chan takes the bracelet and works it over his own hand. Then, he moves Felix’s hand. “If you’re wearing this tomorrow, it’s real right?” 

* * *

Felix wakes to the sound, not of his alarm, but of his ringtone. In the process of trying to answer it off, he knocks over his water bottle and an open bottle of melatonin.  _ Fuck.  _

He knows, almost without looking at the screen that it’s Chan. 

“Felix--” he sounds out of breath, as if he’s been running. 

“Chan” he breathes into the receiver. 

His whole body is misted with sweat, but there’s an uncomfortable sticky dampness between his legs that’s distinctly different. Panicked, Felix throws back his comforter, looking across his legs and blankets for any sign of the strange viscous pink liquid he’d found before. 

But there’s none. 

Together, in unison, they proclaim, “ _ I had the strangest dream.”  _

“You too?” 

“Yeah.” 

“We were at my old apartment?” Chan asks, but his tone suggests that he already knows the answer to the question. 

“Yeah,” and as if the memory of the dream weren’t still visceral in Felix’s mind’s eye. “We fucked on the sofa. And Chan--” There’s a pause over the line. Felix toys with the dry hemp around his wrist. 

Chan doesn’t press him further, because he knows what he’s about to say. “I’m wearing your bracelet.” 

“Yeah, the one that I haven’t taken off in years.” 

* * *

When Chan sees his silhouette back lit against purple light, fractured and distorted by water, he knows. 

Not by any of the features that Felix described, like an uncertain bracket shaped smile, or wide eyes that do not waiver in their incessant gaze. None of these things can be seen in the viewing room. 

Quick, and automatic, it’s only happened a few other times in his whole entire life, but each and every time, he’s  _ known _ . 

Chan watches in rapt fascination, as the man who can be no one other than Minho, stands in the middle of the jellyfish room. 

Chan comes here when he’s tired. Dolphins have cunning minds, and tend to have his next move figured out. 

The fish in the reef room entangle themselves in anemones and coral. Busy colors bleed together into one intangible single pink-green-orange that makes his eyes burn. The sensation of pink-green-orange etch into the back of his eyes and become against the lids when he closes his eyes. Not the best place to go when he’s tired. 

But jellyfish are simple. Jellyfish take no thought because they have no thought. After all, jellyfish have no brain. His favorite have no color, but take on the hue of whatever light is rigged underneath the tank. Jellyfish pulse against the slight current in the tank, but get pushed in a slow, counterclockwise circle from bottom to top. 

Minho’s gaze travels across a tank filled with brown and white sea nettles backlit by the most crisp shade of ocean blue, past the candy ribbon striped jellyfish, ultimately settling upon a large tank of simple, translucent box jellies. The light in the tank changes color every few seconds, oscillating from green, to blue, to purple. 

Slowly, Minho approaches this tank. With his arm lifted above his head, he leans his forehead against the glass. His forehead print joins a thousand others made by overexcited children who pressed their faces to the glass before their parents could catch them. The difference being that Minho’s is quite a few centimeters higher up on the glass. 

“Oh, there’s not a single thought in your head at all is there?” Minho’s voice is soft. “Well, I guess you really don’t have a head at all do you. But there’s nothing at all. Not a single thought.” So soft that he shouldn’t be able to hear it over the looped, generic prog rock electric guitar music that they play  _ constantly  _ in this room. “Well who should I talk to? I’m looking for info about a guy named Chan.” 

* * *

“Hey,” the man that he knows now to be Chan approaches the tank. The wetsuit tugs tight against his skin, and leaves little to the imagination. His expression, although distraught, looks forced as if he isn’t wholly accustomed to this emotion. 

Chan finds Minho, not in the princely state he’d hoped, but instead soaked all the way through, hair, hoodie, and jeans, but he sits on the ledge nevertheless with his legs dangling over the side. Minho clutches Tony, the common octopus, close to his chest. His long tentacles wrap around his neck, his middle, and his hips. Minho whispers to him softly, “ _ it’s alright.”  _

“First Felix? Now Tony?” 

For a moment, all Minho can do is sit on the ledge of the tank and let the words spread across his skin like poison darts. 

_ Disappear.  _ Just plunge down into the enormous reef tank that’s adjacent to where he sits now and swim down deep into the viewing area where Chan cannot reach him unless he suits up in specialized scuba gear. Minho cannot breathe underwater, but he knows that he can hold his breath much longer than any human can. 

That sounds good. 

Minho plunges down into the tank and dives deep, deep, deep down. He dodges between sharks and parts the large, shining schools of mackerel that look like beaded silver fabric when they swim. Onward, and onward towards the glass. 

In the water, Tony’s tentacles unfurl around him as if he were a parachute breaking his fall into the water. 

Minho sighs, air bubbles escaping his mouth in something that almost feels like relief. Splaying his palm against the glass, he has to wonder if the fish can see outward into the throngs of humans that pass through here. Or, to them, does what lies beyond this glass always look like this, black and empty. 

Minho knows that the relief that he feels is temporary, false even. But he expected just a few more moments longer. 

Instead, Chan tears it all away from him when he calls after him. “Minho, you didn’t let me finish.” Calls after him in the same way that Soonie and Doongie do. His voice is felt in the drums of his ears and the back of his mind more than it is heard, loud and omnipresent. 

How? 

How could a human talk to him this way. There’s nothing that he’s read or experienced that suggests that it’s possible. 

Minho turns away from the glass, and sees Chan before him. He wears no breathing gear. As he speaks, the anger sifts out of his voice to something that sounds almost like calm. “You let me see him too. That’s what I wanted the most. So, you can’t be all bad.” 

Chan reaches out towards Minho, and grabs onto his forearm. 

There’s no where else to swim, and nowhere else to hide. 

Suspended in the water like this, Minho can see a constant stream of air bubbles drift upward from just behind Chan’s ears like he has gills. Also not very human. Speaking is an incredibly stupid idea. Water fills his mouth and his nose, but he wants Chan to know that he knows. “You’re not human.”

Chan responds, with a knowing smile and lilt to his voice. Not spoken, but in Minho’s mind, “neither are you.” 


	3. Chapter 3

“Do you uh,” the waitress puts down two stacks of pancakes in front of them. Her voice trails off as she watches Minho try to drink the milkshake he ordered. Not quite understanding how glasses work, he furtively tries to stretch his lips over the wide rim of the glass. “Need anything else?” 

“Nah, we’re good,” Chan responds, waiving her away. “Hey Minho,” Chan is very anti-straw. There’s only one Earth after all. But this has been going on for almost fifteen minutes, and no matter how many times Chan tries to show him how to drink off the rim of the glass, it somehow goes horribly wrong for Minho. So Chan unwraps a straw from paper and sinks it into the glass. “Try this.” 

Minho does as he’s told, wrapping his lips around the straw and finally getting a sip of strawberry milkshake. 

Chan then grabs for the bottle of syrup on the table and applies it liberally to the stack of pancakes. Then he offers it to Minho, who has downed almost a third of his shake. 

“You don’t get brain freezes huh?” 

“Oh, I am in immense pain. It’s delightful. Thanks,” he says, accepting the syrup. Instead of pouring syrup onto his pancakes, he pours a small dollop of syrup onto his middle and index fingers. Then as if he were spraying the tester at the department store counter, he dabs it behind his ears and at his pulse points. 

“Sure thing.” Felix mentioned the Nandos. The cat too; she’s sitting in the pocket of Minho’s hoodie...Well it’s Chan’s hoodie Chan gave him the spare clothes he keeps in his locker since Minho’s loose fitting, robe-coat thing was soaked. But there’s a few tics that Felix never mentioned, maybe never even got to see. Minho blinks at an uncannily slow rhythm. So every thread of conversation becomes a staring contest. “So what are you?” Minho asks through a mouthful of pancakes. “You have gills right? Like a Sossad, but you don’t look like a Sossad.” Minho takes his milkshake in hand, but instead of drinking it with the straw, uses the thin srip of plastic to spoon the strawberry ice cream directly onto his pancakes. “Sossads have green skin.” 

Minho’s food becomes a mixture of pancake and artificial pink, how can two things so delicious combine to look so unpleasant? 

Initially, he felt guilty taking Minho to a pancake house. After all, this was his first night in Seoul. But as some kind of put upon cultural ambassador, Chan supposes that he acts as a representative, not of a country, but of an entire planet. 

Chan abandons his utensils. Suddenly, the rest of his meal doesn’t seem as appetizing. “I’ll tell you what my parents told me. Some aliens came here, and stayed here. They don’t really talk to the rest of the alien,” Chan waves his hand as if he can catch the word he needs out of thin air, “congress?” 

“Exiled,” Minho interjects. 

Chan gives him a cursory nod. “Kind of. Some of us. Like my parents’ parents, visited here once on a “camping” trip in the 1960s. Got really caught up in the American hippie free love movement and never left. Anyway, there’s a species of what people? Aliens?” He’s not really certain what the terminology is here. He’s really only told a handful of _humans_ this story, and never once another _non-human._ “That possess the ability to reproduce with pretty much _any_ species or gender.” 

Minho’s entire expression lights up. He speaks with his mouth full. “Oh my god, you’re a Qhakkas!” And then purses his mouth in an impish, suppressed smile, as if he’s quite pleased of what he’s about to say. “So you have like, fifteen bastard kids?” 

Connecting the dots, Chan supposes that on an _intergalactic_ scale, his species is known, or at least stereotyped, for being rather promiscuous and quite fertile. Chan supposes, albeit begrudgingly so, that his own experiences suggest that there might be some truth to it. “No, but you have syrup behind your ears.” 

“So you’re part Qhakkas, part human, and part Sossad?” 

“I guess,” Chan supposes. “Probably more than that right? There’s the possibility for so much genetic variability...All I know is that my dad looks normal and can breathe underwater. My mom is mostly normal. It’s just that, unlike most middle aged ladies who hide from the sun so they don’t get wrinkles, my mom sits and watches TV with a hydroponic lamp on her because she photosynthesizes.” 

“Was your grandpa like...a house plant?” 

Chan admits in a frustrated huff, “no it was my great grandfather.” 

“That’s kind of weird.” 

“Says the guy who smuggles his kitten with him everywhere he goes!” 

“I’ll have you know that she is the child oracle, demigod of--” Just as Minho starts in, the kitten surfaces from his lap, and takes over. Angry gray paws swipe at the dampened cloth napkin soaked against the counter top. Chaos erupts as Minho tries to shove the cat back into his hoodie pocket. 

Maybe they aren’t lobbing slow ball blows at each other, but instead speak to one another with an assumed familiarity that doesn’t exist. Felix knows him, so he knows him. Even though that’s really not the truth. So he and Minho become two people with four left feet committing cultural misstep after cultural misstep. 

Chan doesn’t wait for the chaos to die down. Instead, he speaks slowly, and calmly over the chaos. “Really, it’s not that weird. It’s all sort of diluted, so it’s just like...My brother and sister and I really like to be in the sun. Which is great, because we also really like to swim. You know, we’re just your regular extraterrestrials next door,” Chan finishes with a smile. 

The statement calls memories of long warm days spent on the beach, and cool nights spent on the boat. As his mind stays within those memories, because it’s difficult for him to carry theconversation forward right now. In that silence, Chan manages to choke down a few more bites, but the pancakes feel thick in his mouth and get stuck in his throat. 

Minho shoves a piece of syrup and strawberry ice cream covered bacon into his hoodie pocket. Purring thunder erupts from across the table as the kitten’s discontent fades. 

Chan’s glad he doesn’t particularly like the hoodie. That syrup is unlikely to wash out. 

Condensation swells and hangs on the side of Minho's glass like overripe fruit. When the weight becomes too great, droplets drag down the glass in agonizing slow. 

“Chan what are we doing right now?” Minho finally breaks the quiet between them. 

“Shouldn’t I be asking you that question? What you’re doing in Korea?” And perhaps more importantly, “Or how and why you let me see my boyfriend?” 

“It’s just time and space,” Minho mumbles under his breath in response to one question, but not the others. 

“I know you’re into Felix.” 

Minho winces, as if Chan’s words were painful. As if Chan so vastly understated the feelings that he had for Felix, that it hurt more than rejection itself. “I know what happened between the two of you.” 

Minho wipes his face with a dirtied cloth napkin and tosses it into the soupy mess of syrup and milkshake on his plate. “You know I’m the crown prince of Nekom, right?” 

“I know that now.” 

“My whole life, the only people who ever had the audacity to tell me no, to prevent me from getting what I wanted, were the Oracles.” 

A kitten that Minho keeps in a tote bag. 

Chan speaks bluntly, “Felix never told you no.” 

Minho speaks bluntly too. “Chan, there’s no greater taboo in my culture than to steal someone else’s mate away. So, I just wanted to see. Make sure, I guess, before I did anything stupid, that you were just as _into Felix.”_ Minho’s word selection is purposeful, Chan can hear it in the tone of his voice. “As he’s _into_ you.” He adds, “he’s really, really into you.” 

“Yeah. I’m into him too.” 

It goes silent between them again. Minho’s expression is frozen in frustration and confusion. The entire time, his eyes are unblinking and unwavering. 

Chan pauses for a moment. All of the words that needed to be said were neatly assembled in his brain. The problem is, Minho, scrambles the frequency, and makes it all jumble together. “Felix and I have...It’s what we call an open relationship.” 

"I don't understand." Minho blinks finally. Impossibly long lashes shroud his downcast eyes as if he were punctuating the statement. 

"There's a part of me. The part of me, that craves the water, the part of me that isn’t human, that makes me want other people. The alien side of me, no matter how much I love Felix, will always want to swap DNA with anything that goes through mitosis.” Chan exhales, but none of the pressure is lessened. 

“Well that makes sense. It’s just a part of your nature.” Minho’s tone is a syrupy mixture of serious and sympathetic, as if he’d forgotten the somewhat crass comments he’d made moments ago. As if the very idea of their natures, while starkly different, were something that were something unable to be defied, and that alone could bring them together. 

They talk to one another as if they are both familiar and foreign. 

And if they keep doing it, over and over, will they will be more _familiar_ than _foreign._

"It’s a part of me that, somehow Felix understands. Except, it’s always been me finding people, asking permission from Felix. I knew that it would happen eventually. Just didn't imagine it like this." 

Chan’s rambling, he always does when he’s just a little bit nervous. “Like, we’ve met a lot of people. There was the guy from my microbiology class--” But the question remains, _why_ is he nervous? Maybe it’s because everyone else was just one or two night stands, Temporary flings had definitive expiration dates. Minho is in love with Felix.

“And ah--this really beautiful couple we met on a surfing trip back in Australia, but they were from here. Changbin and Hyunjin. They were gorgeous.” God, just mentioning their names, he can’t help but remember the image of Hyunjin sprawled out on his back, glistening with sweat, Felix buried deep inside of him--But he digresses. “And we fucked them, and they didn’t steal Felix away from me.” His throat feels dry, not because he's afraid of losing anything, but of what there is to gain.

Chan rambles on in an attempt to cut through the awkward with more awkward, but it isn’t lost on him the way Minho’s face flushes with fluorescent color. Whether it’s embarrassment or frustration, Chan cannot be certain. 

“But it not like, _open, open,”_ Chan says like that explains anything. “Like there’s a guy here I see at the coffee shop, all the time. Seungmin. We flirt, and it’s pretty obvious that he has a crush on me, but since Felix isn’t here....” And that’s the sad part. He’s _exactly_ Felix’s type. “It’s not gonna happen.” 

Chan finds the right thing to say after he’s let all the noise spill from his brain, into, and then out of his mouth, he finally comes to the conclusion that he could’ve started with at the very beginning. But having it come to him, even late, is powerful. So he sets aside his rambling uncertainty, for a tone that’s firmer, and more certain. He can not only meet Minho’s otherworldly intensity, but double down upon it. “What I’m trying to say is that Felix is into you too, but if you want him, you have to be okay with me.” 

Not bothering to ask if they need more water, the waitress comes back and deposits the check on the table underneath a little black tray. Chan hastily supplies his card. His treat after all. 

Her bright red fingernails flash before his eyes, snatching the card up quickly, only confirming how much she wants them gone. 

Chan rises from the table, and lingers there awkwardly waiting for Minho. When Minho finally rises, they leave together. 

“Do you wanna crash at my place? I mean unless your spaceship is double parked and you plan on going back to Australia tonight.”

“Why does everyone think I drive a spaceship?” 

“Cause that’s what aliens drive, man.” 

“Do you have one?” 

“Ah, you got me there,” he chuckles softly. But back home I’ve got this Mazda that’s out of this world.” 

Minho extracts the kitten, the oracle, from his pocket and lets her claw her way up his chest to perch on his shoulder. Minho catches questioning stares from strangers as they walk down the street past bars, restaurants, and shop fronts from the people that spill out of them. Minho throws them back in stride, with his steady gaze. “I’ll stay.” 

* * *

It is highly unlikely that Chan has any descendants from Nekom. 

Independent of that assumption, he understands why the Qhakkas like it here. Humans are quite diverse in shade, and shape. If difference is what they chase, then it exists here. Although, it’s quite unlike on Nekom where the people have familiar, tessellated faces. 

It is unlikely that Chan has any descendants from Nekom, but Chan speaks to the animals under his care in hushed tones, and touches them affectionately. Minho finds it hard to believe that they do not share the same abilities, abilities that were cultivated and honed on Nekom for the people by the Oracles. 

“You can speak with animals right?” Chan scans his badge, leading them back into a part of the aquarium that he’d usually get chastised for being in if he were alone. 

Chan asks him that like he hasn’t witnessed a half dozen arguments between himself and the Child Oracle this morning _alone._ Almond milk wasn’t real milk, and can’t they get her some of the _good stuff._ And she _should_ be allowed to come to the aquarium today. 

“Not like the way you and I are talking,” Minho doesn’t quite know how to explain. It’s like catching a sidelong glance from an old friend and knowing exactly what it is that they mean. “It’s more of an understanding. A way of knowing.” 

The air in this room is damp and tastes of saline. He does his best to try to listen to what Chan has to say, but it’s all but impossible entering this space. Because Chan’s voice, kind and gentle, is drowned out by the drone of a cold and oppressive sorrow. 

“I really need your help with translation.” 

Chan leads him into the larger tank room, where slightly curved gray dorsal fins crest over the water, and dip down below in choreographed succession. 

His chest feels tight when he asks, “what’s happened here Chan?” because he knows that the context is only going to sharpen the pain that he feels. Point it, direct it, and twist when he already feels so powerless. Nevertheless, Minho approaches the tank and splays his palms wide across the glass. 

Almost immediately, a dolphin approaches the glass. 

“A theme park elsewhere in the city had a bunch of dolphins. It was a really bad situation. It closed, and we got them.” 

Minho is told this by Chan, and Minho is told this by the dolphin. Images of overcrowded tanks and cruel training methods. 

“Esther has had a very hard time,” Chan confesses. “She’s very depressed, and that’s why I need your help. Poor girl has given us a couple of scares. Stopping breathing, and sinking to the bottom. So far, every time, I’ve been able to convince her to come back to the surface.” 

“Where’s her sister?” Minho interjects, because that is what the dolphin asks for. Repeatedly. 

“That’s just it. We couldn’t take them all. Some were sent here, and the rest were sent to Jeju.” 

Minho charges up the steps to the top of the tank where the dolphins breach. 

Chan follows. 

Immediately, that same dolphin glides up to the water’s edge. She presents her stomach and waits patiently for Chan.

The energy in the room shifts, albeit ever so slightly. Like a crackle in the wall of sorrow, a single trickle of happiness comes through. And it isn’t lost on Minho, how it’s Chan that brings that to her. 

Chan’s hand glides across her stomach. 

Unconsciously, and automatically, as if for a moment, he’d forgotten to be suspicious of Chan, and his motives, Minho bends down next to Chan and touches the dolphin as well. Esther feels rubbery smooth beneath his fingers. 

The dolphin dives downward, swims the length of the tank, and crosses back. She looks at them expectantly. 

“I don’t have food for you,” Chan shows her his empty hands. 

So she disappears again. 

“These ones, the ones we already had here, we’re all working moving them to the same outdoor habitat. In the end, it will be better. Can you tell her that? That they’ll all be together again someday soon?” 

Minho doesn’t respond. The neoprene suit that Chan asked him to wear is restrictive, and clings to his skin. He knows that it’s meant to swim in, but wearing it makes him feel as if he’s suffocating in the open air. So he rises, tugs at the zipper at the back that Chan zipped him up in with tender touches. 

Much more easily than he got into the suit, Minho banishes the garment to a puddle on the platform. 

“Minho--Minho there are cameras everywhere.” 

Ignoring Chan, he walks off the ledge of the tank and into the water, naked as the day that he emerged from the pod.

Hitting the water, all he does is think about Esther. Exhaling through his nose, he let's the air out and sinks down, down, down. When things are dark, and there’s no escaping from these glass walls, she feels breathless, and the increasing weight of water on top as she sinks further. 

The concrete bottom of the tank is still so far below that he cannot clearly see it. 

Nearby he can hear the blunt _thunk_ of Chan hitting the water. 

He watches as Chan swims down much further than he could ever go. 

He's flanked on either side by a dolphin, even though he moves much more slowly through the water than they do naturally. 

Yes, Chan speaks to animals as if he were from Nekom. 

The dolphins in the tank circle with hesitation, but he tells the dolphins. 

Swimming nearer to him, the dolphins ask him if he’s alright and if he can swim. 

_Don’t worry about me._ And, _Chan promises that you’ll all be together soon. So please Esther. All of you. Please._

_“Then it must be true.”_ Is whispered around him in various interactions, as if a consensus were being formed as they spoke. They repeat what every other creature, at least, every other creature with a brain, has told him. “ _Chan is such a good person.”_

Then it must be true. 

Minho drifts up slowly to the surface. With each inch that he drifts upward, the pressure on his chest is lessened. The fluorescent ceiling lights come into view. Breaching the surface, he’s able to breathe. Cool air contrasts against the sensation of water against his skin. 

Minho parts matted lashes to see Chan in the water next to an open mouthed dolphin. Playfully, he slaps the dolphin’s tongue. “On your way.” 

Their eyes meet. 

He swims towards Minho. “How can you see anything?” Chan raises a black sleeved arm upward to push his wet hair out of his eyes further up onto his head. 

In that moment, he realizes that he’s very naked, and Chan is, from wrist to ankle, very clothed. 

“Thank you so much Minho.” 

Then it must be true. “I did it for them.” 

“You’ve got to be freezing too.” Chan pulls him close to his chest. 

Minho lets him. 

So now he gets to feel it. The sleek neoprene almost feels rough against his bare skin. Minho expects more: stolen touches and complimentary, hungry glances. After all, it’s in his nature. 

But he doesn’t. 

Together, they swim to the edge of the tank. Chan gets out first, and offers him a faded beach towel to wrap himself in. 

“Let’s get changed yeah?” 

“Will you buy me Starbucks?” It’s still early morning. Early morning for humans means coffee, and coffee means something sweet and syrupy in a green and white cup. 

“I’ll buy you coffee. There’s not a Starbucks near here.” 

“Then you should give me money, and I’ll go get some.” Because as he’s learned by now, there’s two things the humans really don’t seem to like. Being bothered while they’re _at work,_ and whenever he uses his soothing powers to get something for free. 

In the locker room, Minho discovers that Chan has ley lines on his chest. 

How curious, wonderful, and strange, that the boy with a moon and stars upon his head has a mate with ley lines on his chest. 

To the untrained eye, the angry red marks are likely to look like scars, and nothing more. But Minho has sat in the hall of quasars, and poured over volumes, and volumes of cartographic literature. Despite his time in the pod, his knowledge of geography was always lacking, and he was subjected to years and years of remedial lectures. 

Now he knows intergalactic geography better than any other of the Divine subjects. He’d recognize the intersection of the thirty fourth lateral and the thousand and first longitudinal parallel anywhere. At that point in time and space, Oracle grass grows in the Ivory Garden. Powerful and intoxicating, his home planet has implemented a thousand-century alliance with the peoples who live there. 

That intersection is written across Chan’s muscular chest in the top right quadrant, just under his clavicle, but right above his nipple. 

On a map, if you trace the thousand and first downward, towards the Ix quadrant lies an asteroid belt of immense significance. For it is here that his ancestors plucked the First Oracle from the trash and the refuse and brought her home. 

On Chan’s body, if you trace the ley line downward, as it is written on his body diagonally, the line intersects a faint, but visible trail of hair, ending just above his crotch. 

But a ley line isn’t a ley line, without multiple points. There are others, red latitudes that take a serpentine route across the flat of his stomach. They highlight different monuments across the galaxy. 

Chan knows that he’s staring, and offers and explanation. “Felix and I went surfing on Christmas day. I got tangled up with a man ‘o war. Or maybe a couple of them.” 

Man ‘o war. Man of war. Men of war. Minho remembers those words from a placard in the jellyfish room. “It looks painful.” 

“Not as bad as it looks.” Chan responds. “My body reacts really strongly to close contact like that, and we had a really hard time removing the tentacles. It’s going to take a long time to heal completely.” 

Chan speaks of the pain that he’s endured, but his expression is anything but pained. An uneven half smirk, he knows that Minho wasn’t just reading leylines. 

* * *

Minho anticipated fitful dreams that night. After all, his mind is fitful too. He spent all night thinking about Felix and Chan. On his communicator, he poured through the royal registries looking to history to provide answers that didn’t exist. He discovered in all of his people’s known and recorded history, none of them has ever had more than one mate _at the same time._ So his mind circled and circled around one persistent question.

So it’s jarring, but not unexpected when Chan appears before him in a dream. 

Chan’s smile is so warm, and so earnest. Little lines bracket his face when he smiles like a frame. 

Minho can feel the rush of light flood to his face. He clamps a hand over the bridge of his nose in a poor attempt to hide what his body has betrayed. Then, in an instant, that spark of warmth flickers heats up to a raging boil. Chan shouldn’t be making him feel that way. 

Chan’s warm smile cocks into a smirk. “I’ve been waiting.” At this statement, bubbles pour out of his mouth. Only then is Minho made aware of the fact that this dream takes place underneath water. 

With this awareness, his senses adjust. Vision slightly blurred, his nose and ears fill with cold water, as does his throat when he tries to respond. 

His limbs feel heavy and drag downward, as if he cannot swim here.

_Breathing._

How is he supposed to breathe when he’s underneath water? 

Panic sets in. More bubbles pour out of his mouth. 

Chan’s voice is calm, “relax. I’ve got you.”

Minho believes him. 

Chan reaches outward and pulls him forward so that he’s flush with the other man’s bare, scarred chest. 

It’s not just Chan’s chest that’s bare. Minho wraps his arms around Chan’s middle. His hand rests at the small of Chan’s back, and he can feel the firm bare flesh of his buttocks in his grasp. His cock is pressed against Minho’s stomach, and he’s hard, but not achingly so. Chan’s desire is patient and consistent. 

Chan doesn’t lick the side of his face, but the juncture of his neck, as humans seem so eager to do. But it’s familiar, and close enough. 

“I see the way that you look at me Minho.” 

“You have ley lines on your chest.” Because this is a dream, and Minho doesn’t have to keep up with tradition or appearances, Minho is free to trace every route on Chan’s chest that catches his eye. He can let his hand dip down lower and touch where his own semi-erect cock twitches against Chan’s own. 

Minho moves his hand loosely around their cocks. When Chan bites his lower lip, concealing the sigh that Minho wants to hear, Minho says in that surprised silence, “You look at me too.” 

Chan pulls him closer. Or rather, _something_ pulls him closer to Chan. Long tendrils slide across his back and his arms. Holding onto Chan’s back, the feeling of warm skin against skin is interrupted by something slimy. 

Pulling his hand away in disgust, Minho’s hand stings. Long translucent tentacles cling to the skin. 

Like a man ‘o war. Man of war. Men of war. 

His hand stings, but he doesn’t pull back when more tentacles wrap around his hips and his thighs. 

Chan’s tight grip on his hips loosens. Minho drifts upward in the water, but the tentacles keep him leashed. When he’s floating above, Chan moves him so that his thighs rest on either of Chan’s shoulders. His upper body floats buyoantly in the water while his lower stays anchored to Chan. 

Chan takes him into his mouth. 

It’s nothing more than a dream, and so Minho is free. Free to shamelessly ride Chan’s mouth. Free to tear and scatter man ‘o war tentacles across the reef bed. Free to cum into Chan’s mouth without warning or the promise of reciprocation. 

Free. 

Minho wakes to the sound and smell of rain and an aching feeling in the small of his back. It was warm in the apartment last night, and Chan opened the window. The apartment is small, and so Minho sleeps on the floor. 

Although the apartment is still quite dark, it’s clear that Chan’s shape is still and sleeping. Curly hair swept forward on his face, Minho fights the urge to stand and push the hair away. 

He’s in no state for that right now. 

Minho hides his eyes in the crook of his elbow and thinks of horrible and unpleasant things like the smell of cooking meat or the feeling of satin against his bare skin. Anything to salt his giant, throbbing, ekly-slug sized erection into submission. 

“Dori,” Minho gropes for the kitten beside him. In her sleep, she soft purr rumbles in response. Minho finds his pajama pants and pulls them on. “Dori, let’s get out of here.” 

“Are we going back to Australia?” 

Minho moves carefully, shutting the door so that it won’t make a sound. Minho doesn’t respond to the cat until he’s out of the building. “Not yet.” 

Out on the street, Minho deeply inhales the scent of petrichor. That clean refreshed scent comingles with the similar, but distinct scent of hot asphalt, and city pollution. Minho allows the scent to coat the inside of his nose, and the back of his throat, and when that isn’t enough he opens his mouth and tastes the air on the tip of his tongue. 

Thick clouds act as a barrier between the Earth and the universe, so that neither the sun or the sky can be seen. It reminds Minho how desolate this place is, how cut off he is right now at this very moment. 

Although Minho and Chan come from different worlds, speak different languages, and believe in very different things, one common thread connects them. They’re both in love with the boy with a moon and stars drawn upon his skin. It’s for that reason, and that reason alone, that Minho tells Dori, the Child Oracle, the most revered keeper of traditions, and culture, and life itself as he knows it, “Dori, I’m ready to break your parents’ rules.” 

* * *

“Chan, you’ve overslept.” 

Minho’s voice is soft and flat, but it pulls Chan from his sleep with a start. His phone reads in smooth, accusatory sans serif letters, 9:30, the exact time that he _starts_ work. On instinct, he rises quickly, fishing a clean shirt from the hamper that he uses instead of a dresser in his temporary apartment. 

It’s only when he’s half naked, shirt stretched across his shoulders that he realizes that it’s _Tuesday_ , which is his day off. 

Tossing the clean shirt to the floor in frustration, Chan announces, “I don’t have to work today Minho.” 

“I know.” Minho responds. Sitting on the floor, he’s got the television on mute, and in the early, gray morning darkness, blue light from the television reflects onto pale skin. His cheeks blush with chartreuse, and the comingled light makes him somehow look more ethereal. 

He’s wearing Chan’s pajama top. Not the kind of thing that he actually wears to bed, but the white cotton clothes with collar and buttons that his mother sent him as a part of a care package. Fleece blanket draped over his lap and Kitten oracle on top, if Chan were to guess, Minho isn’t wearing pants. His hair is damp, but unevenly so. Not as if he’d showered, but as if he’d gone outside in the rain. 

This is only confirmed when Minho reaches just to his left and extracts a white and green cup from Starbucks and takes a long pull. It’s contents are most likely a cinnamon dolce latte with three extra pumps of chocolate syrup. “I wanted to use the phone and send Felix a picture.” As if offering a bribe for his request, Minho pushes an iced drink towards Chan across the carpet. 

Groggily, Chan accepts the drink. He can’t remember the last time he’s slept for so long all at once, and yet he doesn’t feel any more rested. That shouldn’t be a thing, feeling worse after actually sleeping. “Did you steal this or pay for it using my money?” 

From his nest of blankets, Minho extracts his wallet. Chan accepts this too and finds that it’s warm from being next to Minho’s body. 

“Thanks.” 

“Give me the--” Ever since the first night, after Chan insisted snapped a photo and captioned it, “your boyfriend is here.” Minho has been absolutely obsessed with Snapchat, even though he could travel across continents to see Felix in an instant. 

Chan sinks down to the floor where Minho has slept now for four, no this is the fifth night. 

Although Chan’s thought a lot about _why_ Minho’s stayed, he’s never really been able to bring himself to ask. 

Chan unlocks the phone, opens the app, and sits close enough to Minho that he can snap a selfie of both of them. Unfiltered, they both look dark and shadowy in the gray morning light. 

Felix responds immediately with an eye emoji snap. It’s captioned, “You’re shirtless.” 

“What did he say?” Minho asks, reaching for the phone. 

Chan deflects, rolling to his side on the blankets. 

“It’s for me.” Chan responds. He’s dying for a Face Time session with Felix. _“Can we video chat when you’re finished with classes?”_

And then to Minho, “What do you want to do today?” 

“Nothing.” Minho responds quickly. “Why is it that everything needs water here to live, and _yet,_ when it falls from the sky it neutralizes everyone?” 

Chan laughs. “Right? I don’t know, but I feel the same. When the sun isn’t out, I feel really lazy.” 

Chan finds the television remote in Minho’s nest of blankets. He was watching an infomercial for some kind of knife set. Mindlessly, he flips through the basic channels before switching it off. 

Thick sweetness coats his tongue as he tentatively sips his coffee. It’s strange really. Minho doesn’t know him well enough to know that he really doesn’t like coffee coffee, but he knows him well enough to ask for the kind of dome lid that _doesn’t_ need a straw. That sweetness makes his tongue thick, and the words that he might say next impossible. 

“There is something I’d like to try.” 

“Yes?” Chan answers a little too quickly. 

Minho licks his lower lip thinking about what to say. “The waitress in the restaurant. The girl who lives across from your dwelling.” 

Chan doesn’t understand. 

Minho extracts a small bottle of mint green nail polish from within the blankets. “I’m really into it.” 

“Is that right?” Chan moves towards Minho like the way that a magnet is drawn to steel. “I could help you. I mean, I used to do this for my little sister all the time.” But his hands are already resting on Minho’s thigh. 

“Finally Dori, I’m being treated like a prince.” He smiles at the preoccupied kitten; her face is buried in a cup of whipped cream. 

Minho offers his hand and the tiny glass bottle to Chan. Minho’s hand is soft and warm in Chan’s own. 

Minho notices too, “your hands are rough.” Then, as if the promise of silence and additional comments about the sensation of skin against skin, is too much to bear, Minho asks him, “do you want to know why I’m into it?” 

Chan submerges the brush lid into the vial of lacquer, paints the excess off of the side of the mouth of the bottle, and dots Minho’s nail with color. “Minho, why are you into the idea of getting your nails done?” 

“When I was younger, I’d bite my nails. My mom said that it wasn’t proper for royalty. She dipped them in a mild poison that was supposed to make me nauseous. Maybe vomit if I ate too much.” Minho blushes chartreuse now, as if he knows what he’s about to say is shameful, but feels compelled to disclose anyway. “Even though it made me sick, I liked the flavor. Like one time, I got _so_ sick that my mom had to submerge me into a pod. She never _did my nails,_ ” Minho uses that bemused tone reserved only for phrases that particularly amuse him. “Again after that.” 

“Well please don’t eat this. If it makes you sick, I get queasy really easy. So we’ll both be sick.” But he knows that for Minho, it’s more about the memory. He can’t go back in time, or even crawl in the pod, whatever that means. But he can have Chan paint his nails mint green. 

It’s raining again, he can hear the _pit-pat, pit pat_ of water droplets against the window. He _should_ get up and close it. Instead, Chan attends to the more pressing task, moving on to Minho’s middle and index fingers, painting them in mint. “You have to hold still and let these dry you know.” 

“The bottle says _instant dry,”_

“You still might smudge it. It takes awhile to harden.” 

Finishing Minho’s right pinky finger, Chan releases Minho’s hand. 

Holding his palm face up with his fingers bent, Minho examines Chan’s work. In that moment, Chan pulls a memory from the deep recesses of his mind. Some nameless classmate in grade school teasing him because, “if you look at your nails that way, it means you’re gay.” 

And that memory is only relevant _now,_ because he simply cannot help but wonder what Minho’s hand, soft palm and delicate mint nails, would look like wrapped around his cock. 

Minho offers Chan his left hand, and shifts ever so slightly so that the blanket gets pushed further back on his legs. Chan can see more skin, but dares not to even try to steal a glance of anything else. 

Because even though Minho barged into his life, and his relationship, and has made a handful of disparaging comments about Qhakkas _,_ Chan feels as if he needs to prove to, if not Minho, himself, that he doesn’t just want Minho because his DNA is new and varied. 

“Chan,” Minho’s brows and mouth draw into tight lines. “What’s it like, when you and Felix are with other people, but together?” 

At the question, Chan concentrates particularly hard on Minho’s ring finger. It’s absolutely imperative that he not allow a spare drop of nail polish to run outward into the fleshy line of his cuticle. This level of concentration diverts his mind’s energy elsewhere, and allows him to answer a little bit more freely, ignore the red hot blush that’s rushed to his face. “In some ways, it can be really nice. It lets us see parts of each other that we don’t usually get to see,” but that’s not all. “And it lets us see the parts of each other that we might ignore if we’re wrapped up in ourselves.” 

“Does someone ever feel left out? 

“Maybe sometimes? But we try not to do that. We talk to each other, make sure everyone’s okay.” 

“Is it awkward? When you know someone so well and don’t know someone at all?” 

“Yeah, it can be weird.” 

“In the past, when I didn’t know what to do with my partners and things were tense I would recite to my partner passages from the Celestial Comedies until the air tasted less anxious.” 

Chan has no choice but to break his clenched jaw attention and actually _look_ at Minho. “You tell jokes...While you have sex?” 

“Humans take sex so seriously!” 

“Felix? Felix takes sex _so seriously?”_ Chan laughs, because nothing can be further from the truth. 

“You know, Felix and I always ask the other person what they like. If I’m with someone else, if someone else is touching me, Felix tells them what I like.” Chan, distracted by the conversation, and what it means for them, smudges a bit of mint on Minho’s fingers. 

“And you tell them what Felix likes?” 

“Uh-huh,” Chan tries to wipe the polish away, but only ends up making the smudging worse. “Do you want to know what Felix likes?” 

“You’re trying to distract me from the fact that you messed up. But...Yes.” 

“He likes kissing,” he starts out simply, because for Minho, from what he understands, kissing isn’t a given. “You’re a little bigger than him. He likes that. If you hold him down, or lift him up. He likes being fingered.” 

He needs to apply a second coat of polish, and for that Chan is grateful. Soon, he won’t be able to hide behind faux concentration. He’ll have to face Minho, his scrutinous gaze, his bare skin, and the truth. “What do you like? You know. If I were to tell him?” 

“I like holding people too,” Minho responds. “He’s really small.” 

“Yeah,” Chan agrees. 

“But I like being held too.” Minho continues, “I want um--I like um--mouth job?” 

“Blow jobs,” Chan laughs. 

Chan finishes painting Minho’s nails so that every single one is now coated thick in mint color. Chan fumbles to screw the cap back on, but instead it gets knocked over. Chan is certain that polish spills upon the carpet and the blankets. Chan is certain that Minho’s nails must smudge as he touches the side of Chan’s face. 

Minho’s eyes feel different upon him now. His gaze doesn’t feel heavy with trepidation. Nor does Minho’s gaze feel effervescent, as it does when he’s on the cusp of amusement; Chan would know, because even though he’s only known Minho for a short period of time, he chases that feeling relentlessly. Waiting, waiting, for the bubbles to spill over the brim. 

He’s not just staring at the man ‘o war scars on his chest with a mixture of horror and apprehension, the kind that burns more than jellyfish stings, the kind of gaze that Minho gave him at the aquarium the other morning. 

Minho’s eyes feel like want. 

Want for him. 

Chan closes his eyes and risks it all, lapping a long stripe from Minho’s cheek bone to his jaw. 

Minho licks him back. 


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is rly long sorry about all the cock. For visual reference, catamarans are boats that often have net/hammock/trampoline things on the end and depending on the model, a seating area nearby. Visual reference here https://imgur.com/a/xhpd4Rn .

“He’s so into you, I thought he’d just beam himself back here.” And just like that, the biggest problems in their lives, an ocean and time, are gone. The semester ends. Chan gets onto a plane and comes back home to his boyfriend who he missed very, very much. And just like that, the other problem in their lives, a problem that ceased to be a problem, and became something that they both wanted very, very much, vanished into the chartreuse light of the starry night’s sky. 

Felix responds, “I don’t know. You told him about that cat island in Japan.” 

“He left like fifty browser tabs open on my phone looking up a place called the Wisconsin Dells though.”

“The what?” Felix laughs. “Do you think we should call him? I’d hate to interrupt. You know. Wisconsin.” 

Minho wanted them both, and they wanted Minho. 

“Yeah, let’s try.” As Chan speaks he pops the steering wheel up, and pops the lever on the seat to push it back. Both of them pull off their shirts and toss them into the backseat. Then, Felix moves so that he’s straddling Chan’s lap. His skin is already misted with sweat, and when he presses his lips to soft dappled skin, tastes like sweat. 

“Its been awhile huh,” It’s funny. He feels more like he’s back in high school than entering his last year in college now that he’s moved back home. But for now, they're just kids waiting for something shining and neon to fall from the sky and make their lives magnificent. He’s palming Felix’s ass, and worrying another mark onto his collarbone when he speaks next. “Since we’ve done it like this.” 

The way that Felix kisses him is still molten-urgent, like they haven’t been doing it nonstop since Chan came home. Like he still can’t believe that it’s real, and that Chan’s here. They part with a smack, but Chan’s quick to kiss him all over again. Teasing this time, he dips his tongue into Felix’s mouth quickly, but doesn’t indulge him, ending the kiss and catching his lower lip between his teeth. Count the divots in his spine and draw his hands up Felix’s sides so that he shudders into Chan’s touch.

“What’s next?” Felix goads. “Doing it back in the locker rooms after swim practice?” Felix grinds down like he expects something. Chan, rapidly filling out beneath his jeans, has it for him.

“Now there’s an idea.” Chan punctuates the statement with another cloying kiss. 

More contact, Chan pulls Felix closer so that they're chest to chest and breath to breath. "Ah, Chan, it still stings," Felix hisses when he makes full contact with the scars, the leylines, on his chest.

"Do you want to stop?" His skin absorbs everything and retains it for far longer than convenient. The beautiful, like the few faint freckles that he has on his body, absorbed from Felix. The painful, like the man-o-war's venom. Pieces of others cling to Chan, but he always wants more. 

"No. More," Felix commands between fervent, stolen kisses. 

Chan feels it across the bridge of his nose when Felix pushes his hair away from his face and says to him, "God, you're so hot." The feeling spreads across his cheeks and dusts his chest whenever Felix adds,"and green. Hot and green." 

"Its working?" His skin absorbs everything and retains it for far longer than convenient. The miraculous, like Minho’s aurora-blush.

"Yeah," Chartreuse light fills the car, and then trickles out of the open windows, into the night. He could get used to this, the sight of Felix’s freckled, sweat misted skin under the glow of otherworldly light. 

More kissing, more touching, and soon, it’s not just Chan who is glowing. Felix is too, a pale orange that highlights all the freckles on his body. 

“Look babe,” Chan directs Felix’s attention to his neon tinted skin. Chan’s transference onto Felix is nothing new or novel. When they first met as children, Felix could barely swim. By the time they started high school, they hugged and cuddled frequently, and Felix was the second best swimmer on the team. 

But this is newer and cooler. Way cooler. “Wow--” 

Chan swallows up whatever he was going to say next with another hungry kiss. 

_ Thunk _ . The whole car shakes as something heavy hits the hood. 

Both Felix and Chan startle. In the chartreuse light, he can see an amorphous shadow gradually take the shape of a man.

“Hey,” Minho ignores the door proper in favor of stuffing himself in through the rolled down window. Dori pops up over the collar of his hoodie, and bounds onto the floorboard. He reaches for Felix first, lapping at his face before pulling him across the console and into his lap. Then, as if he realizes that he’s now trapped, he shifts awkwardly, jostling Felix and steading him with his hand splayed across his bare ass. 

Chan leans over to meet him. Not only expects, but welcomes the cool feeling of Minho licking the side of his face. 

By neon light, Chan watches Felix move in close for a kiss. 

“Welcome back.” 

* * *

Minho exhales slowly, and as the air is displaced from his lungs, he sinks down, down, down into the blue. Salt stings his eyes when he opens them, but it’s worth it, because he’s greeted by the sight of Felix lithe and perfect, suspended in the water. 

Strong arms wrap around his middle. Behind him, he can feel compact muscle. Through the water, the muted, distorted, but never any less brilliant sound of Chan’s laughter. 

Together, they watch Felix ascend to the surface for air. Only when his lungs scream for mercy, and the pale white soles of Felix’s feet disappear from view does he swim back up to the surface. 

He can only assume that Chan watches him rise to the surface just as they did Felix. The warmth that he feels at the nape of his neck tells him as much. 

“Most people are afraid, swimming out in the open ocean like this,” Felix says  _ after  _ he’s gone through the ugly motions of gasping for air and pushing his soaked hair away from his face. 

Minho wraps his arms around Felix's middle. Felix holds onto the side of the boat. Christened with the name  _ Seafoam,  _ it is the ceremonial warship of the Bang clan. Owned by the elder, presumably, it will be bequeathed to Chan, as he has mastered the handling of it’s two, pristine white sails. Minho thinks that is quite wonderful.

“It reminds me of space walking.” It’s not the same. Movement still offers leverage, but submerged below the water is the closest thing he’ll ever get here. 

“Like what astronauts do?” 

“Hm,” Minho responds. Chan surfaces once more, and now it’s Minho’s turn to wait for him to push the soaked through hair away from his face. “I was the subject of rumors, even as a small boy. For most inhabitants of Nekom, space walking is a right of passage. But few people ever really do it more than once. Few really like it. But I do.” Minho has always loved that feeling of suspension and helplessness. Moving his feet and moving his body nowhere. He took to the ancestral rite right away, and even made a game of it. “I have to wonder, what it would be like if I came back home with  _ two  _ mates who happened to really, really like space walking.” 

Chan and Felix speak over top of one another in a beautiful, but discordant melody, so representative of their personalities. 

“I’d probably be really afraid of space walking Minho.” 

And from Chan, “you want to take us to visit your home?” 

Minho runs his tongue across his lower lip. The taste of salt on his tongue and Chan’s question, serves as a desiccating reminder that there's still so much to figure out about the three of them. 

"Minho?" Dori calls from the deck, darting back and forth from stern to bow and swatting beneath the railing at the waves. "Minho? Minho theres something tasty in the water. Maybe tuna? Maybe swordfish? Can I-" 

"What's wrong?" Asks Chan. 

"She wants fish." Minho responds. 

"That's fine," Chan joins him and Felix at the ladder, reaches upward, and scratched the divine jaw with wet withered fingers. "We're not at the aquarium anymore Dori." 

Dori responds with a pleased sound, opal glowing purple. The ocean water churns beneath them until an enormous fish, several times her size, rises up from the water and on to the deck with a satisfying smack. 

Back on the boat, he and Felix fix a canopy to the boat’s railing to shield them from the sun. 

Felix, so fixated on the task at hand sits up too fast and whacks his head on the railing. A sharp cry of, " _ fuck!"  _ ringing out on open water. 

"You okay?"

" _ Ithinkicrackedm'skullopen,"  _ Felix's voice becomes super thick, and all one worded sp his translator doesn’t really pick up what he's saying. 

"Let me see," Minho embraces him and pulls him down underneath the canopy. This end of the catamaran is simply a frame, and stretched across that frame is a taut hammock like net. The stretchy fabric dips underneath their weight. A kiss to the crown of his head says he says, "No it's fine, the material is very thick and durable." 

" _ GetbentMinho," _

It's different this time with Felix, and it's not just because Chan is here now too. Now, Minho can see that there's a difference between the person that he built Felix up to be in his mind and the person that's with him right now. 

Felix swears under his breath at mild inconveniences and speaks so quickly that he doesn't understand. Felix changes from this exotic and distant thing to a close, imperfect, but wonderful person. 

For a while they sit together, Felix's face buried in the crook of his neck, Minho watching the deck.

"Everything alright?" Chan attends to the sails. The ocean winds, quiet for some time, have perked back up and pull them southward. 

"Yeah," Felix mumbles, low and defeated. 

Minho's attention turns to Chan, bare save for a pair of swim shorts. His muscles flexed as he reaches overhead and adjusts a rope.

The tentacle scars on his skin look particularly exotic now that his pale skin has taken on the faintest of golden hue. 

"Take a sip babe, you'll get dehydrated." Felix interrupts this particular line of thought. Felix says that to him a lot. That Chan makes him thirsty, which is a human indicator of arousal, which is- "I'll have you know I'm quite hydrated," Minho huffs, his eyes never leaving Chan. 

"Nah man, it's not a figure of speech this time." Felix dangles an aluminum flask in front of his face, obscuring the view. "The sun on open water is brutal."

That seems true. Minho's skin feels tight and warm even only after a short time in the sun. So he takes a long pull of water, and when he does he can see sunspots on the lids of his closed eyes and feel the crawling sensation on his skin, heat and being watched. 

“Minho, are you doing okay?” Chan fastens one of the sail ropes and hurries to their side. “What are the symptoms of dehydration in your people? In humans it’s things like headache, thirst, what color is your pee? What color is it normally?” 

Minho can feel his face glow green in irritation. “I’m fine.” 

Where he has to learn, make himself see all the little scuffs and dings in Felix's soul, its the opposite with Chan. At first those were all that he could see. So now he just keeps on uncovering detail after detail that makes him sparkle and shine like the reflection of sun on the water. 

“Okay, so long as you’re fine,” Chan says dropping into the net with them. The fabric sinks and they all jostle closer together. Even under the canopy, shielded from the sun, it’s uncomfortably hot. 

This is relieved by jumping off of the boat once more: Felix face first, Chan in a graceful backwards arch, Minho legs and arms spread wide in a belly flop. Swimming is interspersed with half sitting, half laying on each other in the nets. Each time they resurface from the water, the harsh afternoon sky seems to settle a little bit lower. Each time the kisses last longer, touches linger for just a few more beats before getting interrupted by laughter. 

Ending with sky in a brilliant gradient of night, and day, and the twilight in between. They drift, in boat and in heart into that liminal space in between. 

Talking around it, they all know what comes next, they’re just not certain how to get there. “What did you notice about Felix first?” Chan asks. 

“His pants’ zipper was undone and his shoes were untied.” Minho lies for the sake of being mean. “That’s why you fell into the pond.” 

Felix laughs. “You said I smelled like moss.” 

“What?” Chan laughs. 

“Which is extremely intoxicating its like for us its like...What is that scent that humans like, from that ugly horrible plant?” 

“Roses?” Chan supplies. 

“Yeah,” Minho responds. Licking along stripe from Felix’s jaw to the lobe of his ear, and it’s not lost on him, how his mate blossoms under his touch. 

Then it’s Minho’s turn to ask Chan, “what about you?” 

“You’re embarrassing me,” Felix complains, but it isn’t lost on Minho how he looks at Chan waiting for an answer. 

“That’s impossible to say,” Chan offers. “Our parents were friends first. We lived down the street from each other growing up. Its always been Felix.”

“Ah,” it happens less and less these days, but when it does happen, it hurts. Feeling excluded from whatever this is that Felix and Chan have. “True, bwerma.” And when Chan and Felix look at him quizzically he translates, “The closest thing would be...soulmates.” 

Even though it makes the shells of his ears to see it, Minho doesn’t look away when Felix kisses Chan. It’s something that he’s allowed to see. It’s neither urgent nor chaste, just warm. “Maybe we are. I don’t know if I believe in that.” 

Felix asks next. “What about you Minho? Tell me.” Like he has to know for sure that Minho is in it not just for him, but for Chan as well. “How did you know you were into Chan?” Felix makes this demand while tracing the soft skin on the inside of his thigh. Because, while the other two wore shorts into the water, Minho wore nothing, as always. “It’s because he has a nice cock right?” 

“Mine’s bigger,” Minho scoffs. Then he quickly course corrects. “I mean we--” It shouldn’t be hard to talk about. “I don’t know I showed up. And you know, Chan found me irresistible.” 

“Um, you kissed me.” 

“Shhh!” Felix playfully slaps him. “I wanna hear about it from him.” 

“I don’t know. He was really easy to talk to. And he painted my nails.”

“The mint was really cute,” Chan adds. He grabs Minho’s hand and uncurls his fingers, studying the dark black polish he wears now. It makes Minho grow green in irritation, but both Felix and Chan have to notice the way that his cock twitches, after all he swam with them naked, remembering what happens next. 

“I kept staring at them. You know. When my hand was wrapped around your cock.” 

“Oh, I thought you were looking at me. You know. Because my cock is--” 

“Shut up,” Minho pushes Chan in a way that hovers between playful and malicious. 

Chan doesn’t seem to mind. Offering, without even prompting from him or from Felix. “I just really liked how much you liked Felix. That was attractive to me.”

And then, there’s really no explaining it, he’s kissing Chan. Kissing them the way that humans kiss. Mouth to mouth, tongue against tongue. It’s visceral, and it’s direct, and it’s everything that Chan and Felix are, and everything that he’s not. Then he’s kissing Felix, and then Felix and Chan are kissing once again. They move so quickly, that there’s so little time to feel like he’s left out in those scant moments where he has neither Felix or Chan to kiss and for that he is grateful. By kissing him, by kissing them, it makes him feel like he could do anything. 

He and Chan move together in an eerie type of unison. It’s amazing to believe that he, not so long ago thought of him as a rival, especially when they work together. Both of them tugging at the drawstring and waistband on Felix’s swimming trunks all the while stealing more kisses. Rubbing at Felix’s cock, it offers distraction, and freedom for them to touch and kiss each other. 

“So uh, whose going first?” Felix asks. 

“You should decide babe,” Chan offers. Minho is impressed. Good diplomacy begins with an offer, not a concession, but an offer. Chan may not have been trained in the Nemb method of diplomacy but at least he has tact. 

“That’s not fair.” 

“How about this. Best two out of three?” Minho offers. 

Chan, without a better solution, nods yes. Fleeting touches on Felix’s cock, and the the cleft of his ass are abandoned. Yes, they make Felix watch with fascination and mortification as both of his alien lovers do three lightening fast rounds of rock-paper-scissors, or punch, slap, poke as his people more appropriately call it, to see who gets to have his ass first. 

“No way,” Felix interrupts. “Show me.” Felix continues with an impish smile. “I wasn’t there in Seoul. I’ve never seen the two of you do much more than kiss. Show me that you like each other.” They both must look at him in confusion, because Felix supplies rapidly, “I’ll be with the one that doesn’t cum first.” 

Minho supposes that he understands. He and Chan are still figuring one another out, still trying to get comfortable. Felix, gentle, and considerate, wants to make sure that all the pieces of this intricate glass contraption  _ work.  _

So Chan’s kissing him again, this time, the way that they do it. Flat tongue on Minho’s cheek. So then Minho’s kissing him again, once again the way that humans do it. And he’s tugging on Chan’s shorts, but Chan has the upper hand both in his own body strength and Minho’s state of dress. Minho has no choice but to fight dirty, tickling at Chan’s ribs. Getting him naked. Slip sliding over the nets and fiberglass deck. It’s all going to well and then--Well, Chan’s pinning Minho to the net. 

Holding Minho’s hands high up over his head, Chan takes his time to lap up and down Minho’s neck. hen, hands on his hips, he holds Minho down and looks up at him. 

“C’mon Minho, can’t I give you a mouth job?” Chan laughs at Minho, referencing something that they said to one another in private, something that he says now to make him feel closer. It works. 

“Mouth job?” Felix laughs. 

“Well, you call it a hand job,” Minho cranes his neck to look at Felix while he’s still wrestling with Chan, even at the risk of losing outright. 

The risk is well worth the reward. Felix sits perched like an oracle upon the satin altar upon the fiberglass portion of the deck, fisting his cock with satisfaction as he watches his lovers tussle out on the nets. It’s like a gladiator’s arena, and they fight for the favor and affection of their oracle.

“Why would this be any different?” Turning his attention back to Chan, Minho rolls over quickly, and knows that action is his best shot at winning. 

He swallows down Chan’s cock immediately, neglecting to realize that this position leaves him quite vulnerable. Looming on top of Chan, inverted, Chan has perfect access to his cock, and he insists on taking advantage of it. Craning his neck upwards he takes Minho into his mouth. 

And the combined sensation of Chan’s mouth on his cock, and Chan’s own thick cock stretching his throat wide so that he feels like he might gag almost makes him lose Felix’s little game right then and there. 

“You know what that’s called Minho? When you do it like that?” Felix asks. Not waiting for a response, he continues. “Sixty-nine.” 

Felix probably says it to him because he’d think it strange. Absolutely not. In his own culture there is a sex position known simply as twelve becaue in order to execute it, one must ensnare their lover in the twelve tentacled silk tree. Ah, he’d love to do that with Felix some time--but the task at hand is so much more urgent, and he absolutely  _ must  _ focus. 

Because the feeling of Chan’s mouth, warm and wet on his cock is wonderful. Chan sucks him with an enthusiasm, no an  _ aggressiveness _ that makes two things very clear. He wants Minho to feel very good, and he wants to fuck Felix very much. 

But Minho has a trump card. Really, when he thinks about it, it isn’t fair to Chan, but it’s much harder to divide things equally between three than it is two. 

All Minho need do is lap against the thick vein on the underside of Chan’s cock. Let Chan fuck up into his mouth and bide his time. Unlike humans, whose secretions seem to do nothing other than get things slightly  _ damp,  _ his people produce a substance that acts as a relaxant and an intoxicant. With each greedy, swallowing motion that Chan makes around his cock, the better Minho must feel to him. 

It’s easy to tell that it’s working. Chan’s attention on his own cock becomes erratic. He raises up to meet Minho’s mouth in frantic, and more powerful motions. Soon, just as he’d hoped, Chan spills into his mouth. 

And when it’s over, his first action isn’t to rush over to Felix and claim his prize, not as he intended. He flips around and pins Chan down onto the nets, much like Chan did to him and kisses him deeply. 

Felix, their sun kissed oracle, can only murmur, “wow,” in response. 

* * *

Minho rises from the nets with a wild, unhinged look in his eyes. Felix has never been afraid of sharks in the open water, but now he feels like he’s going to be consumed whole. Joining him on the more stable part of the deck that’s lined with cushions. Felix has gotten many kisses as the afternoon melted into the evening, but none of them quite so demanding as the one that Minho gives him now. 

His hands are upon him, almost right away, teasing his cock and pressing against his hole. “You’ve started without me and Chan,” he husks into his ear. 

It’s not exactly a secret. Chan had brought their bag, with lube and and other fun things out onto the deck with them. “I couldn’t help myself. You two were--” 

“Don’t you think,” Minho interrupts him with another, urgent kiss. “That is something that should be done by me or Chan?” 

The possessive lilt to Minho’s tone makes him shiver.  _ Oh.  _ It’s one of those  _ sexy weird alien sex ritual things.  _ Okay. That’s something he’s used to. That’s something he likes. 

“I agree,” Chan joins them now too. “Minho and I wanna.” 

“Go ahead,” Felix urges. “It was just a finger or so. Couldn’t help it.” 

Minho demands that he turn over onto his stomach. The sensation of being someone else’s prety is only amplified. For as much as he worried about this moment, Chan’s protectiveness and Minho’s possessiveness combines to become something wonderful as both boys lavish attention on him. Chan spills lube down his crack and the small of his back. Minho fists himself furiously until his own hand is coated in pink, translucent liquid. Together they take turns tracing his rim and stretching him slowly, ever allowing the other more than a thrust or two at a time before switching it up again. At first, Felix very much liked it. 

But the novelty of teasing has given way to absolute frustration. There’s never enough time for rhythm, never deep enough to hit just the right spot. 

“C’mon, it’s not fair.” Felix chides. “Minho, fuck me.” 

“Ah, but he is inside of you,” Chan teases. 

As if on cue, Minho curls his fingers inward, caressing Felix’s innermost walls. 

“You know what I mean.” 

“Ah, this one is hard to say no to,” Minho says as he withdrawals his fingers. Holding his hips high, Minho pushes inside. Even though he and Chan did their best to stretch him out thoroughly, there’s something about this time that makes it feel so much fuller. 

He knows that if if he told most people their secret, that they fuck other people, they’d ask  _ how.  _ The answer is simple. He likes it very much, and it feels so good, because he’s never without a cock inside of him, or a hand or mouth on his cock. Maybe that makes him greedy. 

Chan likes to tell him, especially in moments like now, that it makes him generous. 

When Chan is hard once more, Minho guides him upwards so that he’s standing on his knees, leaning back against Minho. 

Chan wraps his hand around Felix’s cock. 

“Ah--Minho.” Somehow, Minho’s cock feels larger inside of him the longer that they fuck.  _ Oh right.  _ The night they met, Minho’s cock filled out even more once they were fucking, and then they were stuck together. Minho’s cock worked like the knotted cocks of certain kinds of animals. “Minho, watch out for--” As much as he wants to have Minho’s cock trapped inside of him, to lay together out under the stars, and have Minho fall asleep inside of him, he wants to fuck Chan too. Wants to feel the closeness that he has with Minho now with Chan. 

“I don’t--” But it’s already too late. 

Felix can feel it swell and catch around his rim, pumping cum deep inside of him and keeping it trapped there. 

“Felix-ah. I can’t” like he knows what he’s doing, but is already too far gone. Minho licks Felix’s neck and the space between his shoulder blades in apology. Minho cums deep inside of him, and Felix can feel every pulse of his cock. Cum coats his insides and makes him feel unnaturally warm. 

Chan keeps touching him. Minho wraps his hands around his front and joins Chan in working his cock. The sensation of Minho growing thick inside of him was slow and gradual. The feeling of Minho and Chan tugging at his cock is quick and urgent. And when those sensations combine, they send him over the edge and into the deep quickly. He’s cumming, cumming onto Minho and Chan’s hand.

Holy fuck. Like he knew that it would be good. He knew that they wouldn’t stop until he was absolutely ruined, but this is like a whole different level. His whole body feels like it’s humming, keyed up, like he didn’t just cum. 

Minho’s still buried deep inside, still filling him up with strange pink cum. His cock presses relentlessly against his prostate even though his own cock is spent and soft. As uncomfortable as it may be, Felix wants more. 

Minho tries to move them so that they’re more comfortable while they wait out Minho’s knot, but it’s easier said than done when they’re stuck together. Lazily they lay on their sides, teasing and petting, and sucking Chan, who was already hard just from watching them. 

Chan’s skin flushes neon from the previous contact with Minho, and it’s easy for Felix to get lost looking at the patterns of light that linger on his skin and marvel at how they contrast against the darkening night’s sky. 

Chan speaks to them in a soft and slow voice about how good they look, and how lucky he is. But those sweet nothings live up to their namesake. Chan sounds like he’s underwater, and Felix only catches every other syllable. 

There are plenty of people in this world, this universe, that are loved, but Felix has to wonder how many, or would it be how few, experience this kind of love more than once? Feel this kind of love simultaneously, and if they do, how do they do it? Because it feels as if the capillaries in his cheeks would burst at any moment from the glow. 

He couldn’t articulate that sentiment if he were functioning normally, let alone now, which is why it is so important that he let his body speak. 

Although Minho makes no attempt to to pull away from him, still pulses inside of him, he can tell that the swell of his knot has gone down considerably. 

“Chan,” and the sound is so cracked and broken that he barely recognizes it as his own voice. 

“You ready for me baby?” Chan pushes his hair away from his face with one hand and cups his chin with the other. Felix has no choice but to look at him. Sure, Chan’s looked at him plenty of times with another man’s cock buried inside of him, but never...Never with that amount of love. And he’s certain that not only his face, but his whole body flushes with neon now from contact with Chan, who has had contact with Minho. He blushes, not just because of how they make him feel, but because of what it is that he’s about to ask. 

“Nuh-uh.” Chan’s expression changes for a fraction of a second from warmth to a sliver of hurt and Felix course corrects quickly. “I mean I do.” 

He feels so relaxed right now, like he’s floating. Vision tunneled, everything looks like it’s been cast through filter and  _ whoa.  _ He’s past the point where Minho’s cum makes him feel buzzed, he feels downright  _ fucked.  _

As if in retaliation, Minho rocks into him. Although his knot reduced in size, his cock is still hard and buried deep inside of him. Felix, unconsciously ruts back into him. He’s sloppy and wet, and it feels good, but now that he’s stretched so wide it isn’t enough and--Fuck, he’s got to get it together, because if he keeps going, Minho’s certain to knot him again. “Blobfish please.” 

“Minho, be still,” Felix tries to be firm. Minho listens, at least in part, keeping still buried deep inside Felix. He nibbles his ear in an attempt to elicit a reaction. “I want you both.” 

Chan looks at him thoughtfully through half lidded eyes. “You’ll have us both love,” he says stroking his cock like he already knows. “If Minho ever gives us a turn.” 

“I don’t think that’s what he means Chan,” Minho’s voice is mischievous, like he too knows. 

“Then what does he mean? Felix?” 

In that moment, Felix realizes that there’s no shame in asking. After all, he is loved. “Both of you at the same time.” 

“Are you sure about that baby?” But Felix can tell by the tremble in Chan’s voice that he loves the idea. That he wants, more than anything, to be that close to him and Minho at the same time. Feel them,let them imprint upon him and leave their marks on him at the same time. 

He’s so fucking loose right now it’s not a matter if  _ if  _ he could take them both. It’s  _ if  _ one of them would be enough. “I’m sure--” Felix insists.

Chan kisses him nice and slow like he’s about to walk him to the door after a date, and not at all like they’re about to do something that would make even porn stars blush. 

While he’s distracted, Minho wraps his fingers around the base of his cock and pulls out. 

Felix whines with discomfort first of Minho pulling out, his cock not yet returned completely to normal size, and then at the emptiness. Chan is good, and swallows up those desperate sounds the best that he can. 

Minho rubs whatever cum has spilled out onto the skin between his thighs and his ass. 

Chan and Minho are looking at one another like they’re planning without words, what to do with him. Trade tentative, hungry kisses, like revisions to a plan that Felix is not yet privy to. 

“Do you think you can ride me baby?” 

Felix’s gut reaction is to exclaim, “ _ duh.”  _ But in that moment, he’s acutely aware of how shaky his legs feel from having already been fucked. A dull ache settled into his body after Minho knotted him, and hasn’t gone away. 

Breathily, he assures Chan, “ yeah. Yeah I think I can.” 

They shift on the deck again so that Chan is seated upright so that he can have more control. He guides Felix down onto his cock slicked with lube and it feels like coming home after a long day away, just the right kind of comforting. 

Chan presses his lips to Felix’s collar bones and his neck before pulling him close to his chest and kissing Felix tenderly. Skin to skin with the man-o-war stings once again, the kiss serves as a distraction. 

Chan talks him through the pain, “just think about how good we’re gonna make you feel.” 

“It’s gonna be so awesome,” Felix says in a pinched tone through gritted teeth. 

Chan reaches for Minho and pulls him into a rough kiss, and by the end of it, he’s blushing green. Head rested against the catamaran windows, hand tucked up under his hand, he looks up at Minho with satisfaction. “Yeah it is.” 

Chan rocks up into him gently, and Felix meets him with every thrust. His skin burns in the place where he and Chan are joined and the place where his palms rest on his chest. The shakiness in his legs evens out as his cock fills out against his stomach. 

“More,” Felix, commands between fervent, stolen kisses. “C’mon.” 

“Not yet, Blobfish,” Minho says with a soft smile. He stands on the deck again, hand clenched tight around the base of his cock as if he wants to make sure that his knot doesn’t flare outward again. He’s still hard, and leaking pink. “Suck me again?” 

“That’s a little-ah” Chan choses that moment to grab Felix’s ass and drive his cock deeper. “Selfish right?” Felix understands that there’s no way he can win that argument. He’s begging both of his alien boyfriends to fuck him both at the exact same time. 

“It is isn’t it?” Minho asks him, edging the tip of his cock towards his mouth. Felix accepts him without further protest. The taste of himself is strong on Minho’s cock, but it only makes his cock twitch against his stomach in embarrassing arousal. “I can’t help it. You look so warm with my dick in your mouth.” 

Which makes the glow that Felix felt from the praise melt into laughter awkwardly around Minho’s cock. He feels it across the bridge of his nose and dust his chest when Minho pushes his hair away from his face. 

“Hot Minho,” Chan speaks over Felix’s shoulder to Minho. “Hot is the word you want.” 

Minho’s cock feels thick in his mouth; Chan makes him feel full.. Spit pools in his mouth faster than he can swallow. The pink pearl beads of precome on the tip of Minho’s cock are replaced by a constant trickle. Just when he thought that Minho couldn’t make him feel any more drunk, the walls of his mouth and his throat tingle. 

“You probably figured it out but, my people’s bodies create a relaxant for our lovers. With so much of it inside of you. Here.” Minho traces his lower lip. “And down there, you should be able to take us both.” 

Comingled saliva and cum dribble out of the corner of his mouth and down his chin. It’s harder to suck and fuck at the same time. Chasing both, but in his altered state, failing to get either. It’s like he can feel each individual cell in his body, and he wants to ask Chan and Minho if they have ever felt that way before. His neglected cock feels so pitiful, but the very idea of trying to touch it right now almost sounds like the sensation would be too much. 

Felix pulls of Minho’s cock with an obscene slurping noise. More pooled spit spilling over his lips onto Chan’s skin. His request, which was supposed to be something like,  _ “I’m ready.”  _ or “ _ More.”  _ or “ _ Please, Minho fuck me too.”  _ But it comes out as a garbled mess of mashed syllables, like he’s had a few shots of novocaine at the dentist. Felix tries to explain this, but once again it comes out as incoherent words and more drool. 

“You good?” The concern in Chan’s voice is real, but so are the shallow rocking motion of Chan’s hips as he continues to fuck up into him, even when Felix has stilled. 

“Our blobfish is fine, right?” Minho drops to his knees to give him a kiss, and holy fuck Minho is a  _ really _ good kisser. His fingertips work in slow circles rubbing in places on his jaw line and chin where drool and precum have spilled, the tingling sensation blossoming outward on his skin. 

By some miracle he manages a, “ _ yes.”  _

“Good boy.” Minho seals his praise with a light kiss against the shell of his ear. Then he settles between Chan’s legs. Chan’s strong arms hold him steady, finger tips digging into the flesh of his ass, he’s certain to leave bruises there. Another strong pair of arms, Minho pulls him back against his chest. 

Felix is vaguely aware that when Chan and Minho speak, they’re talking about him. Taking around him and trying to figure out how to best do this without hurting him. He  _ should  _ tell them that he’s fine. Shift ever so slightly to make himself a little bit more accessible. But all he can do is focus on the magenta colored light that ghosts across the hull of the boat and Chan’s skin. 

“Are you sure?” 

“He’s good,” Minho breathes into his ear. And to make his point clear, Minho works his index finger inside along with Chan’s cock. “Still really worked open.” 

“I’m really good.” Felix insists, still sounding drunk, but coherence coming back to him slowly. 

“Okay,” Chan gives them permission to move forward, sealing it with a kiss for Felix. 

He’s never seen Minho’s cock when it’s knotted. All that he knows is that it  _ feels  _ big. Like, really big, splitting him in two in the  _ best  _ kind of way. But he  _ knows  _ that Minho and Chan together  _ must  _ be bigger. Because where Minho’s knot burns in the very best kind of way, something that’s absolutely taboo but  _ feels  _ so right. Minho and Chan together, really feel like they’re going to tear him apart.  _ “Fuck.Oh-Fuck-” _

“Felix,” Chan’s voice is breathy, and in that moment, it’s good to know that Felix isn’t the only one on the edge of losing control. “How’re we doing?” 

“Full,” he manages. “Really full.” It’s only then that he realizes that he’s been holding onto Chan for dear life. His fingernails leave harsh, sunken, half moon shapes in angry red hues on Chan’s chest. He does his best to relax his grasp, but--

“Hurts?” Minho asks. His fingers trace a long, intricate pattern teasing his nipples into hardened round buds. Doing his best to relax him, Minho touches across his chest, and resting on his stomach. 

His belly bulges there and  _ holy fuck that’s their cocks.  _ That’s how wide they’ve stretched him. 

“A little.” Felix confesses. 

“But you’re taking us so good,” Chan encourages. Then, there’s the sensation of his rough hand enveloping his cock. Familiar in some ways, Chan touches him like this when they fuck often. Completely foreign in some ways, with the heightened sense of touch, Felix squirms each time Chan’s rough calloused hand grazes across the ridge of his cock. 

“You trust us though right? To make you feel good?” Minho asks. And as if on cue he can feel Minho’s cock pulse deep inside of him. Another rolling wave of warmth cascades through him. He doesn’t need to see to know more pink fluid sloppily dribbles from his hole down his thigh, taking the edge off. 

“Uh-huh.” And he does, even though he knows that it’s a monumental task the discomfort is gradually edged out and it feels like he’s floating again. 

“Can we move?” Chan asks. 

Felix’s his head rolled back resting on Minho’s shoulders, getting addictive little nips and licks that make him clench and tighten around their cocks. He rolls his head forward and looks down at Chan, “Can you?” Even without moving, it’s difficult for them to stay together, he feels as if with each breath, he’s going to do something to make Minho or Chan slide out. Has to hold on to Chan’s chest.

Chan looks past him now, into the space just behind his shoulder, certainly at Minho. They speak silently to each other now, mentally calculating and recalculating the sweetest way to fuck him. 

The movement begins disjointedly. “Oofs,” and “I’m sorries,” mingle with half gasps and shuddered moans. “Move your hand,” and “I’m trying.” In the chaos, someone’s cock will catch on his rim, dangerously close to falling out making Felix gasp in surprise. 

Then, somehow, maybe more of that secret glance language that only Minho and Chan seem to know, they find a rhythm. Both of them plunging deep and sliding back in blissful syncopation. 

“How-how-is it?” Because Chan loves to talk to him during sex. Although he doubts that he can manage a single word right now. Because waves of pleasure build, and build, and build, but never crash. Even though the stretch and the constant pressure  _ there,  _ and the many, many, many hands that roam his body feel amazing, it’s impossible to concentrate on one without getting interrupted by the other, and he’s simply afraid that he just might drown. 

“A lot,” Felix manages breathily. And then, by some miracle, “you?”

“Like you know when we jerk off in the shower?” Chan asks. 

Felix does. Both their cocks pressed together, their hands clenched tight sliding around both their cocks in disjointed movements. 

“Like that, but a thousand times better.” 

The moment of tenderness between them is short lived. Minho pinches him on the ass. 

Felix responds with an involuntary flinch and a sharp cry of “Hey!”

Minho lavishes him with attention now that Felix is giving him his undivided, or at least as undivided as you can when another man’s cock is buried deep inside. Licking long stripes down his jaw line, and the lobe of his ears he confesses. “I wanted you for myself for a minute, blobfish.” Speaking in a hushed low tone that makes him tremble, Minho tells him, “Chan’s cock feels so good. He’s so sensitive.” 

Minho’s hand shifts from his ass to between his legs, but it’s Chan that writhes with pleasure. Minho must be cupping his balls, teasing the soft skin there. 

__ Minho and Chan combine their efforts, and turn their attention back on him, fucking him slowly but threatening to overwhelm him constantly. 

Felix focuses on looking downward at his own stomach and the faint outline of cock that presses against his skin. 

Unlike his first orgasm, which built slowly, the next is torn out of him. Demanded by the two strong bodies that ask so much of him. Felix cums in strong bursts across his stomach, without so much as having his cock touched once. “Oh  _ fuck.”  _

It sends a shiver down his spine when he’s called, “good boy,” not by Minho, but by Chan. 

Unlike before, the static doesn’t clear from his mind. The tingle at the base of his spine that builds and builds right  _ before,  _ an orgasm never fades. Leaking a steady stream of pre-cum, and still aching hard, it’s like he never came at all. 

“Oh my god.” 

Felix knows that it’s going to happen again. It’s going to happen again and it’s going to hurt, but only in the way that it hurt when Chan and Minho fucked into him at once. Only in the way that it hurt when Chan pulled him across his chest and his skin stung. It hurts, in only the way that you can hurt right before something amazing happens. So he accepts, chases, his next orgasm. 

“Minho,” Chan calls out to him, and in that moment, Felix wonders what’s happened to have broken their almost telepathic connection. “I’m--” 

“Blobfish,” Minho breathes hotly into his ear. His thrusts slow down, as if he were being particularly careful of something. It’s a strange contrast to the way that Chan, moves fucking him faster, harder, because he’s so  _ close.  _ “Forgive me, but I believe Chan is owed his turn now.” Sliding out, he kisses him tenderly on the cheek. 

And Felix doesn’t understand. Doesn’t understand how he can feel so empty with Chan’s cock still buried deep inside of him. Doesn’t understand  _ why  _ Minho left him. 

He doesn’t get the chance to think about  _ why.  _ Chan flips them so that Felix is on his back. It’s intimate and it’s primal the way that he holds on tight to Chan’s shoulders leaving angry bright red marks as Chan fucks into him. His hole slowly closing around Chan’s cock, getting used to the sensation of  _ less.  _

Or maybe, his body simply responding to a different kind of more. Chan’s cock catches against his rim in a way that it  _ shouldn’t  _ if he’s stretched this loose. 

It’s then that he realizes that lights in shades of neon pink and green aren’t the only thing that Chan’s absorbed from Minho’s skin. 

“Chan?” 

“It’s fine. I got you.” Chan’s forehead slides against his own, beaded with sweat they meet for a sloppy, open mouthed kiss.

“We’ve got you,” Minho corrects. “We’ve got you.” 

With that Felix lets go of whatever final shred of self control he’d been clinging to, giving himself over to Chan and Minho. 

Minho presses his cock into his mouth and Felix sucks sloppily. He can the knot grow at the base of Minho’s cock. The growing knot forces the tip deeper into Felix’s mouth. Slippery pink fluid making him feel all relaxed and gelatinous, but he doesn’t even gag. 

Neon lights, and jellyfish scars, and alien cocks. Chan’s body absorbs, and borrows characteristics, and retains them for just the right moment. 

Chan’s knot fills him completely, and paints his walls, already slick with Minho’s cum. 

When Felix cums again this time, it isn’t sudden, or torn from him. It feels like a ripple that starts out in the small of his back and rolls like a wave outward. It’s larger, and more powerful, enveloping his cock and then the rest of his body. 

And Felix is loved. 

* * *

Chan wakes to the light of the moon and the soft, persistent, periwinkle blue glow that emanates from Minho’s body. 

He’s fallen asleep on the nets, Felix curled up close next to him. The memory of his cock changing shape and form, and burying it inside of Felix comes flooding back to him. Warmth at the memory of falling asleep inside of him, and a sense of regret when he finds that they’ve shifted in sleep. He’s slid out of Felix. His ever changing body, and Minho’s influence on it, is just a physical manifestation of  _ how  _ Minho manages to bring them somehow closer and closer together. 

Minho sits on the edge of the boat with his legs dangling over the side. Dori sits next to him. The boat, and the sky, and the water surrounding them cycles through a constant cascade of orange, pink, and green light. 

For a moment, Chan only watches. 

Then, he kisses a still sleeping Felix on the crown of his head, and joins Minho at the edge of the boat. 

“I cannot read your instruments properly, but I believe that we’ve drifted a bit off course.” 

“No surprise there,” Chan responds. It happens often when he and Felix take the boat out. Have sex while he should be tending the sails, and then drift back to port hours, or even days off schedule much to his parent’s ire. 

“Chan?” Minho rises slowly and sheds the hoodie he’d been wearing. Light reflects off of his pale skin. “Will you go space walking with me?” 

Chan rises too. Still naked, there’s nothing left to discard. “It would be good practice, wouldn’t it?” Before walking off of the edge of the boat and into the open ocean he looks at Minho, smiles, and says, “sure.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There will be one more chapter, a short lil epilouge.


End file.
